Lua was created in 1993 by Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes. They are members of the Computers Graphics Technology Group (Tecgraf) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janerio.
From 1977 until 1992, Brazil had strong trade barriers for computer hardware and software; these barriers were called a market reserve. At the time, clients of Tecgraf could not afford software from abroad. They would have to go through a complicated process to prove their needs could not be met by Brazilian companies. This caused Tecgraf to implement its needed tools from scratch.[9][10]
Lua followed SOL (Simple Object Language) and DEL (data-entry language). They are computer languages that described and managed data. They had been independently developed at Tecgraf for two different projects. These projects were for engineering applications for the Petrobras company. Petrobras later wanted more power in SOL and DEL. They lacked functions to control flow.
Lua’s syntax for control flow was mostly borrowed from Modula. It also taken influence from other programming languages: CLU for multiple inputs and outputs from calling functions,C++ for local variables, and SNOBAL and AWK for associative arrays.LISP andScheme also influenced the focus on tables. These two languages used a single structure mechanism.[11]
