The H Speed Guide to Lua (The H)

What's really annoying to me is another piece of frugality: no regex library, but instead a *new* domain-specific regex-like language with less power and gratuitously different syntax, just because the implementation is a bit smaller (not even very much smaller than some modern regex implementations). Sure, a regex module is available, but other packages will generally prefer to use 'patterns' instead, because they're built in.