TCL, Forth and Lisp are languages with minimum possible syntax, delegating all higher-level concepts to runtime structures and conventions (e.g. which list position means what), whereas Lua for its syntax and semantics inherited, pruned and elegantly integrated the best features of Modula-2 and other languages. It is true that Lua is more familiar to C developers than the mentioned languages, since both Lua and C look back to the ALGOL ancestry; but Lua - unlike C - clearly follows the Pascal heritage.