-- the sieve of of Eratosthenes programmed with coroutines -- typical usage: lua -e N=1000 sieve.lua | column -- generate all the numbers from 2 to n local function gen (n) return coroutine.wrap(function () for i=2,n do coroutine.yield(i) end end) end -- filter the numbers generated by `g', removing multiples of `p' local function filter (p, g) return coroutine.wrap(function () while 1 do local n = g() if n == nil then return end if math.mod(n, p) ~= 0 then coroutine.yield(n) end end end) end N=N or 1000 -- from command line x = gen(N) -- generate primes up to N while 1 do local n = x() -- pick a number until done if n == nil then break end print(n) -- must be a prime number x = filter(n, x) -- now remove its multiples end