Lua in Rift
 

with the exception on functions and registered events is it them same as WoW?

I asked Zorba about this a week or two back. It's pretty much the same, minus the WoW-specific functions/events/etc.

cool, i wonder if it would be possible for someone to make a wow2riftlib were it translates WoW functions/events etc to Rift functions/events etc (and vice versa), then that way all a author would have to do is hook the lib without having to modify their mod to work in rift.

It would be imperfect at best: some functionality of WoW may be unavailable in Rift and some functions may have the same name but different parameters and return values. In those cases, you could write a library with a new name and use that new name in the AddOn, but that still requires modifying the original AddOn.