Re: class notes for Lua course based on PiL

Subject: Re: class notes for Lua course based on PiL
From: Fabio Mascarenhas &lt;mascarenhas@ ... &gt;
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2013 19:04:00 -0300

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 7:56 AM, Fabio Mascarenhas <mascarenhas@acm.org> wrote:

Hi everyone,

Last July I gave a two-week summer course on Lua programming (including using the C API) at Nankai University (at Tianjin, China). The classes were not recorded, but I put all of the class notes (annotated slides, source code, exercises with answer keys) online at

http://www.dcc.ufrj.br/~fabiom/lua/

The material is based on the third edition of Programming in Lua, so it can be useful as a crib sheet for most parts of the book.

This looks quite helpful to individuals learning--and teaching--Lua-based courses. I wished I had it 3 months ago when I started to learn Lua and 1.5 months ago when I started to use it in an academic course. I will link it into my course website.

Your course looks interesting! I am a fan of the interpreter approach to teaching programming language concepts myself, and have taught two courses with that approach, using PLAI, with one using Racket as implementation language, and the other using the functional parts of Scala. I noticed that this is the first time you are using Lua in this course, may I ask why you picked Lua?

Writing parsers in LPEG is easy, but making the parsers output nice error messages when syntax errors happen can be tricky. I have a student that wrote a set of functions on top of LPEG that help write parsers with basic error reporting, I will ask him to send you a link.