My Lua presentation went well

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

Hi all,

Thursday night was my Lua presentation. There were about 12 attendees. It 
appeared to me that about four were extremely interested, continually asking 
questions. When I thought I'd made a mistake and told the audience not to make 
that same mistake, an audience member pointed out, using what he'd just 
learned 10 minutes before.

After the meeting I talked to one guy. He said he'd come to the meeting to see 
if Lua could play a part in mixing in with C, and now that he understood the 
basics, he decided it was. So we got a new adherent that night.

Because I was given less than 2 hours, I put the Lua2C and C2Lua examples 
first, so they'd be seen no matter what. I think that was a good choice -- it 
let them know right up front this is a useful language.

Next I did four table exercises: 1) Table as array, 2) Table as lookup (hash), 
3) Table as index (one sorted version of another table) and 4) Table used like 
a database table (rows and columns). While showing these, I managed to teach 
functions as data, comments, pairs() and ipairs(), numeric and generic for 
loops, table initialization, multiple returns, table.sort() and #tablename.

Then I got into the more advanced stuff:

* If and while syntax
* Closures and iterators
* OOP (closure method)
* GUI (IUP)
* Callback functions

The callback part used my "continue substitute" iterator and showcased the 
hyper-extensibility achieved by callbacks.

Each part starts with a Lua-IUP built "countdown slide" that displays for X 
number of seconds and then disappears, to be followed by a gvim session of the 
code and a terminal running the code.

Thanks to all of you for helping me with the presentation!

SteveT

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt