Fun fact: Lua started its life as a language for representing data like this. At first it only had lists and hash tables but over time it gained support for thi

Fun fact: Lua started its life as a language for representing data like this. At first it only had lists and hash tables but over time it gained support for things like if statements and loops, to be able to describe more interesting data. Eventually it morphed into the Turing complete programming language that we know today :) https://www.lua.org/history.html https://www.lua.org/history.html The current version of Lua still has some traces of that origin. For example, to keep RAM use manageable when parsing very large files the parser directly emits bytecode in a single pass, without building an intermediate abstract syntax tree.