Instructor · Brief Description · When/Where · Syllabus · Bibliography

Instructor

Roberto Ierusalimschy is the leading architect of the Lua programming language. He is an Associate Professor at PUC-Rio, Brazil, and a Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University.

Brief Description

Scripting languages are a popular choice for programming embedded systems, as they allow rapid application development and take care of much of the platformʼs underlying complexity.

This course will discuss the tradeoffs in the design of an embedded system language and how one can adapt languages to embedded systems. The course will review several popular options today (Forth, Java ME, PyMite, etc.) and focus on Lua, a popular language used in systems ranging from Adobe Lightroom to World of Warcraft. Course assignments will involve using Lua to program the BeagleBoard-xM, a low-cost, ARM-based embedded platform.

When/Where

Classes meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:15-3:30pm, in MEYER 142.

Rules for room 36.

Syllabus

1	Introduction
2	Why Scripting? Why Scripting for embedded systems?
3	An overview of Lua
4	Functional facilities
5	Tables and data structures
6	Tables and language constructs: environments and modules
7	OO programming in Lua
8	Memory management and weak tables
9	Event-driven programming and coroutines
10	The Lua-C API
11	User-defined types in C
12	Some real use scenarios
13	An overview of the implementation of Lua
14	eLua: a distribution of Lua focused on embedded systems
15	Scripting languages x dynamic languages
16	Embedding x extending
17	Tradeoffs in language design
18	Other languages for embedding
19	Languages for "highly restricted systems" (sensors)

Bibliography

Roberto Ierusalimschy.
Programming in Lua, second edition.
Lua.org, 2006.
John K. Ousterhout.
Scripting: higher-level programming for the 21st century.
IEEE Computer, 31(3):23-30, March 1998.
Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz H. de Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes.
The evolution of Lua.
ACM SIGPLAN 3rd History of Programming Languages Conference, 2007.
Elizabeth D. Rather, Donald R. Colburn, Charles H. Moore.
The evolution of Forth.
ACM SIGPLAN 2nd History of Programming Languages Conference, 1993.
Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz H. de Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes.
Passing a Language through the Eye of a Needle.
Communications of the ACM, 54(7):38-43, July 2011.