Scheme-based markup language

[Lalo Martins <lalo at hackandroll dot org>]

Ever since that docstring thread, I've been musing over a
Scheme-based markup language and how it could be more
convenient than SGML/XML for a lot of things (as some may know,
I'm working with Zope, and altough it's a very cool platform,
it's shortcomings have a way of getting in the way and not
letting me forget they exist...)

Yesterday the Telco decided to fry our link, and Brazil was
lost in what is perhaps the biggest national holiday, so I had
nothing better to do and decided to bend myself over the Guile
source (and an old copy even, because I couldn't download the
current one), to figure out how hard it would be.

And then I learned about read-hash-extend, and was enlightened.

LOOK MA, NO PATCHES!

The whole infrastructure requires absolutely no changes to
Guile, and not even a compiled module. I'm impressed. (And
relieved, because this means my work probably won't be rendered
useless by the new module system, the new goops C interface and
whatever else is coming).

The results, as they currently stand, are at
http://zope.gf.com.br/lalo/projects/CMH (Compact Markup for
Humans is the name).

It's designed around the admittedly complex desire of achieving
these two quite different goals:

- generate documents with dynamic portions, much like Zope's
  DTML or good old embperl; and

- be the basis for a format to write documentation and books
  in, like DocBook or Texinfo, but easier on the author (that's
  the reason for the project name).

The "analysis" stage for it was converting a pretty big and
complex Texinfo document to the hipotethical format I was
conceiving. It convinced me it's a good idea. If you're
interested in the markup subject, take a look.

[]s,
                                               |alo
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