User:Merlin11188/Draft

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Hello World

The language I'm teaching you is called Lua. A tradition of programming languages is to start off the learner with a Hello World program. So what is a Hello World program? It is a program that writes the words "Hello World" to the output. Here it is in Lua:

Example

Hello World

print("Hello World")

Ta-da! For now and the rest of the tutorial, that box on the left is the output. Keep that in mind. Print is our function for writing to the output. When we want to print string literals (words, like Hello World) to the output, we must put them in quotes. Here's another example:

Example

Hi Newcomer!

print("Hi Newcomer!")

Beginning

Terminology

There are three terms I want you to know before we continue:

• code refers to anything written in Lua.
• chunk refers to one line of code in Lua.
• script refers to multiple chunks that accomplish a specific task in Lua.
• character refers to any of the ASCII Values (numbers, letters, spaces, enter key, down arrow, etc.)

Comments

Before I start explaining the stuff you can do in Lua to you, there is something I need to explain to you that I'm going to use a lot in this tutorial: Commenting. Comments are things that are not executed by Lua. A comment can contain any characters because it doesn't need to be read.

One-Line comments

A one-line comment is made with --. It lasts for the rest of the line. Here are some examples:

Example

Hello world

print("Hello world") -- This will print Hello world to the output!
-- I'm invisible! print("Hi"). Hi won't be printed to the output!

Multi-Line Comments

A multi-line comment starts with --[[ and ends with ]]. Everything between the opening and the closing is treated as a comment, even if the comment is only in the middle of the line.

Example

Hello World

print("Hello World")--[[
I'm a very long comment.
In fact, I last multiple lines.
Should I be discovered, I must… but that won't happen.
]]

A multi-line comment cannot be placed inside of a string literal (inside of quotation marks)! You must put it elsewhere. Here are more examples:

Example

print("Hello M--[[I'll never be found!]]y Friend!")
--[[They'll never catch me!]]print("HI")

Hello M--I'll never be found!y Friend!

HI