85123">talk about LPeg</a>
given at the III Lua Workshop.)
</p>

<p>
Following the Snobol tradition,
LPeg defines patterns as first-class objects.
That is, patterns are regular Lua values
(represented by userdata).
The library offers several functions to create
and compose patterns.
With the use of metamethods,
several of these functions are provided as infix or prefix
operators.
On the one hand,
the result is usually much more verbose than the typical
encoding of patterns using the so called
<em>regular ex