newbie: lua "commands"?

[Rob Shaw <rob@...>]

Hi,

We're just starting to use lua in a lab control context, and I have a 
few questions.
I apologize if these are in a FAQ.

Say I want to just have a simple command

> turniton			or even
> pwd

I see how to define functions like

> turniton()
> pwd()
> turnon 'the_lights'

but can I extend things a little bit to leave out the parens for 
certain key words?
I could certainly preprocess the strings in the interpreter before they 
get handed
to the lua parser (which I gather is luaL_loadbuffer()?), but would I 
be re-inventing
the wheel.

Also, in a shell window, you can typically scroll through previously 
typed input lines
by using the up-and-down arrow keys.  This too could easily be written, 
but is it
already in some small add-on?

We're in Mac OSX, and are impressed with the ease of pulling in 
external C libraries
with tolua and swig.  But we have a lot to learn...

rob