use Wireshark’s Lua interpreter stand alone

It's technically possible to achieve it, by writing a Lua script that creates a console window, accepts user input, and calls loadstring() on the strings/chunks the user inputs. In fact my guess is someone's written a Lua "interpreter" as a Lua script somewhere, that you could use as a baseline to write such a console app.

But I don't do that personally - I just mostly use tshark with the -X lua_script: command switch. Basically I just keep a file open in my text editor called "test.lua", and use: tshark -r empty.pcap -X lua_script:test.lua to run my test script. Then all I have to do is up-arrow and run that command again and again, as I modify+save my test.lua file in my editor. And I use an empty pcap file so I don't have to ctrl-c to stop tshark, but instead just tell it to read that empty one in (using the -r switch), which keeps it silent.

In the more recent 1.11 nightly builds you can also pass arguments to your Lua script through the commandline, which was mostly added to help create some testsuites to test the Lua functions. But I rarely use that feature other than for those testsuites.

Oh, and I suppose I should point out, lest someone go try and write a Lua interpreter-window script, that you wouldn't be able to do some things in it anyway... because some things are only allowed by wireshark when it's loading scripts itself.

For example creating new protocol dissectors (ie, the Proto class/object), or creating protocol field extractors, or creating menus, etc. Those things have to happen at a specific time, and they happen right after Wireshark loads the Lua scripts but before anything else, and never again.

Heh, you actually answered this question yourself in another topic - the "Evaluate" menu item under Tools->Lua appears to do what you want. For example, you can have it print to your shell using:

print("hello world")

Or have it print to the Console dialog window created by Tools->Lua->Console using the logging facilities, such as:

message("hello world")