Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, and embeddablescripting language. In this project, we extended theknowledge from lectures of Programming Languages andimplemented an interpreter of Lua. This report describesthe techniques, data structures and algorithms for interpretingLua language using Java and JVM. To illustrate the issues andtechniques in interpreting Lua, we implemented the Lexer,Parser, AST, Interpreter and Execution phases for our Java-based Lua Interpreter.
In general, the design of Lua interpreter can be divided into front-end and back-end stages. The front-end stage contains source code analysis, lexer, parser phases, and the back-end stagecontains interpreting and executing. To be more specific, we have five main phases which areprepercessing with Lua source code, lexer, parser, interpreterand execution result. In the interpreter, we have two differentmodes to interpret our abstract syntax tree. In the lexer andparser, we both include the exception catching system to helpour interpreter to handle specific lexer or parser issues. Eachtime we can take a Lua source code as input then execute theLua code and gain the execution result.