This is metalua-0.3.9, an alpha version of the Metalua compiler. 

This software and its documentation are released as open source
material, under the MIT Public License, as described in the file
LICENSE. It uses source code and documentation from other open source
projects, all released under the MIT License, namely:

- Lua, for its virtual machine, developped by the Lua team at the
  Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil,

- Yueliang, a Lua compiler in written in Lua, developped by Kein-Hong
  Man, constitutes the base of metalua's bytecode dumper.

- Rings, a part of the Kelper project, lets handle multiple Lua states
  from within Lua.

- Pluto, developped by Ben Sunshine-Hill, allow serialization and
  deserialization of arbitrary Lua data. It is used to improve
  communication across the states created with Lua Rings.

- Bitlib, developped by Thomas Reuben, implement bitwise operators in
  Lua, and eases the bytecode dumping.

Main changes since metalua-0.3:
===============================

- the compiler/interpreter executable has been completely
  rewritten. It address several shortcomings, such as:

  * integrated REPL loop;
  * ability to properly run programs, among other by passing parameters
    to them;
  * isolation of compilation processes: when several files are
    compiled, the alterations caused by one to the copmiler won't
    affect the compilation of the next ones;
  * richer API, through a standard commond line options handling library.
  * automatic insertion of a require() statement making sure that the
    metalua runtime is loaded before a program starts running, even if
    it's precompiled and run later.

- the ability to process Metalua source files is optional (added with
  a "require 'metalua.compiler'" statement), and works correctly for
  all functions that might cause compilation: require(), loadstring(),
  loadfile(), dofile().

- the mlc converter (the hub that handles translation between all
  program representation formats such as files, source strings, token
  streams, AST, executable functions etc.) has been completely
  rewritten.

- parts of the compiler are now written in Metalua, as opposed to
  plain Lua. The compiler building process now includes a
  bootstrapping stage, i.e. the generation of a minimalist Metalua
  compiler in charge of building the final one.

- isolation of compilation processes is achieved by Springs, a library
  that fusions together Lua Rings and Pluto, allowing to create
  independant Lua universe that communicate easily together.

- the structural pattern matching library has been significantly improved:
  * bug fixes;
  * optimized support of multiple simultaneous values match;
  * a match statement causes an error if no pattern succeeds to capture
    the value(s)

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