Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Operational Semantics For Featherweight Lua, Hanshu Lin

Master's Projects

Lua is a small, embedded language to provide scripting in other languages. De- spite a clean, minimal syntax, it is still too complex for formal reasoning because of some syntactic sugar or specific syntax structures in Lua.

This thesis develops Featherweight Lua (FWLua), following the tradition of lan- guages like Featherweight Java[1] and Featherweight JavaScript[2]. The goal is to develop a core of language features that, while remaining simple enough for formal reasoning, also remain faithful to the central characteristics of the language. Specifi- cally for Lua, the core features that are essential for our modeling include:

∙ First-class functions …