Just curious, what don't you like about Lua? (I think I read that they use 1-based (instead of 0-based) array indexing. That seems like it might be annoying.)
Lua looks good to me. I was trying to see the performance benchmark from the shootout link, but it's down. I'm pretty sure I put Lua along with python. Docs/libraries are great, but is on the slower side. Lua is on my list to learn :)
