It’s been some time since I don’t follow closely Lua development. But I try to keep updated with what’s going on. The announcement of LuaPOD 0.1 caught my attention (due to the gathering of three technologies I find quite interesting).

Lua is a nice scripting language, especially designed for embedding in larger applications. Lua has one of its niches in the development of games, and World of Warcraft is among the most famous pieces where Lua is used as a scripting language. But, of course, there is more about Lua (for example, take a look at lua-users.org or LuaForge).

Some days ago, it was announced in the lua-l mailing list a new library LuaPOD, which renders the markup language POD as HTML or TeX. The intention of the library itself is to provide support for POD as markup language for the wiki at the Sputnik project.

POD is the Plain Old Documentation format well known to the users of the Perl programming language. Most of Perl’s related documentation (including the core libraries and CPAN modules) is written using POD. A variant of POD (known as PseudoPOD) is used at O’Reilly for producing books themselves.

In turn, the implementation takes advantage of the brand new LPeg library, a new pattern-matching library for Lua that is based on Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs). LPeg brings to Lua an improved pattern matching library compared
to the basic support that was provided by the string library which is part of the standard Lua language. Among LPeg features, it allows for an efficient and simple implementation with
full-featured pattern-matching capabilities.

I found this a very intriguing project built on a set of open-source technologies which I hope to find the time to investigate further in the future.