I don't know about Octave or NumPy, but R has most of the low-level
Wrapping C/C++/FORTRAN/Objective C libraries into R code is
well-documented and has been for a long time.
Indeed. And R (like those other languages) has a built-in standard typed array data type so that all those different libraries can actually exchange data efficiently and easily. Since I have some numerical and image processing libraries that I have bound to Lua, I was simply asking whether there was interest in defining a simple standard for Lua.
Tom