Capturing Lua variable as a string

["Lythoner LY" <lythoner@...>]

Hi All,

I am working on an interesting industrial automation application where I am proposing Lua to our customer as a configuration and scripting language. 
I found Lua in search for better language with small runtime, easy to extend feature. I like Lua because it so simple to use, understand, very handy and
compliments python on many places. 
I need the community help to
standardize my configuration stuffs which I am writing now.

We needed to provide a simple shell scripting capability to our user where they can read and write data to the device(industrial automation). We have the core layers developed in C# and I was able to call C# from Lua and Lua from C#. And also I can write & read the data with the device. Perfect. I also modified one window based IronPython User control to support Lua on .NET. For us, Lua would have a window based User control to allow user to read and write data. I did replaces "print" function Lua with my C# callable function, hence I could capture the "print" function output. For me, it is OK so for.

Now I needed a help on configuration.

function DEF_PARAM(v)
return v
end

DeviceParam1= DEF_PARAM
{
NAME     = "DeviceParam1",
TYPE     = INT
}


DeviceParam2= DEF_PARAM
{
NAME     = "DeviceParam2",
TYPE     = INT
}


DeviceParam3= DEF_PARAM
{
NAME     = "DeviceParam3",
TYPE     = INT
}

The above is the configuration I use. Like "DeviceParam1", I have tens of thousand configurations parameters. DEF_PARAM is an example function which just return the variable as it is. But we do some extra business logics inside. I have taken them out in this posting. 

DeviceParam1 is used as a variable(a table instance). I need it like that. But I have defined one more property called "NAME" which is assigned to "DeviceParam1" string. The same is repeated for all variables. Instead I want the string equivalent of variables DeviceParam1, DeviceParam2, DeviceParam3 handled internally by Lua and assigned to  NAME property.

Here is example.

function DEF_PARAM(v)
-- do something here to set NAME property from v
-- v["NAME"] = ???? How do I get string equivalent of variable v
return v
end

DeviceParam1= DEF_PARAM
{
-- NAME     = "DeviceParam1", -- I have taken off the NAME assignment here
TYPE     = INT
}


DeviceParam2= DEF_PARAM

{
TYPE     = INT

}



DeviceParam3= DEF_PARAM

{
TYPE     = INT

}


In shell,

> print(DeviceParam3.NAME)
DeviceParam3

>print (type(DeviceParam3.NAME)
string

Regards,

Krish