3.2 – Variables

Variables are places that store values. There are three kinds of variables in Lua: global variables, local variables, and table fields.

A single name can denote a global variable or a local variable (or a function's formal parameter, which is a particular kind of local variable):

var ::= Name

Name denotes identifiers, as defined in §3.1.

Any variable name is assumed to be global unless explicitly declared as a local (see §3.3.7). Local variables are lexically scoped: local variables can be freely accessed by functions defined inside their scope (see §3.5).

Before the first assignment to a variable, its value is nil.

Square brackets are used to index a table:

var ::= prefixexp ‘[’ exp ‘]’

The meaning of accesses to table fields can be changed via metatables. An access to an indexed variable t[i] is equivalent to a call gettable_event(t,i). (See §2.4 for a complete description of the gettable_event function. This function is not defined or callable in Lua. We use it here only for explanatory purposes.)

The syntax var.Name is just syntactic sugar for var["Name"]:

var ::= prefixexp ‘.’ Name

An access to a global variable x is equivalent to _ENV.x. Due to the way that chunks are compiled, _ENV is never a global name (see §2.2).