Functions can take arguments. An argument is some data that will be passed into the function. You have passed arguments to the print function before; it takes a single string argument. Calling print with an argument looks like this: print ('hello, world').

When you declare a function, you can place one or more variable names inside the parentheses that are used during the function declaration. These variables are the function arguments; they have a scope local to the function.

The following function takes in two numbers and adds them together:

-- Declare the function, takes two arguments
function AddAndPrint(x, y)
  local result = x + y;
  print (x .. "+" .. y .. "=" .. result)
end

-- Call the function a few times
AddAndPrint(2, 3)
AddAndPrint(4, 5)
AddAndPrint(6, 7)