The Carbon documentation refers to some types that may be uncommon to some Lua users. Types in the documentation with lowercase names can be found here.

Standard Lua Types

These are types representable by the Lua type function, some by different names.

string

This is a standard string type containing text or data.

number

This is any number, including nan, inf, and -inf.

bool

A value representing true or false. Lua knows these as boolean values.

nil

An explicitly empty, or non-existent value.

table

This refers to a table with any structure. Tables have two types of data storage, the list and dictionary parts. The list part may be traversed with ipairs, while the dictionary part (which is a superset of the list part) can be traversed with pairs.

userdata

Generated by C methods or through the newproxy function.

coroutine

A Lua coroutine, generated by a few different standard Lua functions.

tuple

A loose grouping of values used when returning multiple values. A tuple<N, x, y, z> denotes the length and constituent types of the tuple.

Extended Lua Types

These types are non-standard subsets of the standard array of Lua types. They specify more specific variants of the above primitives.

(x, y, z)

A conglomerate type indicating that this type can be any of the types x, y, or z.

x?

Where x is any other type, represnts that type or nil. Known as a "nullable" type, since types are non-nullable by default. This is the same as (x, nil).

loose<x>

Many types can be represented in a 'loose' form, often used for intermediate conversions to prevent allocations.

any

A generic type that any other type can fill.

FFI<x>

Denotes a type designed for the LuaJIT FFI. Only available under LuaJIT.

void

An explicitly empty, or non-existent value. This is used in place of nil for method signatures.

indexable

A string or table, or a userdata with an __index metamethod. These types can have their members without throwing errors.

char

A single-character string.

unumber

An unsigned, positive number.

int

An integer.

uint

An unsigned, positive int.

list

A table with data in the list part. Data can also exist in the dictionary part of the array, but it will not be used. A list can specify the types of its values, in the form of list<valuetype>.

dictionary

A table with data in the list or dictionary parts. A dictionary can specify the types of its keys and values, in the form of dictionary<keytype, valuetype>.

set

An alias to dictionary<any, bool>, that is, a dictionary whose keys can be anything, but whose values must be boolean. A set is said to be "explicit" if it contains both true and false members, explicitly excluding members from the set by name.

Sets can override the default key type of any using the form set<keytype>.