Wow, something I wrote made the front page of HN? Cool!
I don't have any particular use for Lua now and maybe never but Lua is such a beautiful language, that I can't avoid liking it. I invite anyone reading this to give serious consideration to Lua even if just for the novelty factor.
Lua is taking off at both small and larger conpanies because it allows to extend Nginx easily with custom plugins, by using OpenResty.
As a lua newb, lexing seems to be impossible since there doesn't appear to be a non kludge way to access the characters of a string in sequence. I suppose lpeg is using lua's pattern matching a capture facilities behinx the scenes?
string.sub does this. I usually set __index in the string metatable to a function that lets you index strings and get the right thing.
This is exactly what lpeg is for. Lpeg is written in C.
Another interesting Lua project is Kong, which became the most popular open source API gateway http://github.com/mashape/kong