Lua has lambdas. They too suffer from verbosity, of course, but they're there.
function(x) return x; end function(x) return x; end [ (x) | x ]
And for Lua 5.1:
http://lua-users.org/files/wiki_insecure/power_patches/5.1/l...
(I personally don’t use patches like this because “Lua 5.1” is something pretty standardized with a bunch of different implementations; e.g. I wrote my Lua book with a C# developer who was using the moonsharp Lua implementation)