Detecting code blocks when executing a Lua script line by line

This may sound like a silly question but I could see no mention anywhere of this particular problem. Basically:

I want to execute a Lua script line by line, primarily to have the ability to pause/resume execution anytime and anywhere I want. What I do is simple: load a chunk with luaL_loadbuffer() and then issue a lua_pcall().

Thing is... How can I properly detect Lua blocks in order to execute them atomically?

For instance, suppose there's a function in the script -- by executing 开发者_如何学Pythonthe file line by line with the method described above, I can't seem to have a way to properly recognize the function, and in consequence its contents are loaded and called one by one.

I can imagine that one solution would be to manually handle a stack where I push control keywords I can recognize in the script ("function", "if", "do", etc) and their corresponding "end" clause if I find nested blocks. Once I push the final "end" I call the entire block, but that sounds simply awful. Surely there must be a better way of doing this.

Hope it makes some sense, and thank you!

Please take a look at Lua coroutines to implement that functionality for scripting game entities. The idea is to yield the coroutine in the sleep() and waitforevent() routines you mentioned, and then resume later (e.g. after a timeout or event occurs).

Use lua_sethook().

Note that you probably do want to experiment with what exact hook call granularity you need. I'd recommend executing chunks of bytecode instructions instead. One really long line may contain many instructions.