I've recently been thinking about what sort of syntax would be most useful
and powerful for a document formatting system. My initial thought was about
what I wanted it to feel like when writing it, because I want it to be easy
to use and easier to remember then something like latex. I've run across a
problem in figuring out how I should evaluate information inside of the
document. Here is an example of a document:
(defdocument :title "Title"
:abstract "This is an abstract"
:date (date)
:author "Gavin E. Mendel-Gleason"
:body
"Some text to be output."
(show "image.gif" :border-size 10 :center 't)
"Should something like a defun be nessessarily wrapped in a progv
such that its return value would be nil, therefor distinct from
something that should be used by the formatter."
(progv
(defun add3 (n) (+ n 3)))
"End of the document."
(bibliography))
Any other suggestions are welcomed.
--
"Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon."
-Alan Perlis
········@unm.edu (Gavin E. Gleason) writes:
> I've recently been thinking about what sort of syntax would be most useful
> and powerful for a document formatting system. My initial thought was about
> what I wanted it to feel like when writing it, because I want it to be easy
> to use and easier to remember then something like latex. I've run across a
> problem in figuring out how I should evaluate information inside of the
> document. Here is an example of a document:
>
[example of syntax snipped]
I think one thing to consider is extensibility. How would users add
for instance a :LIST-OF-FIGURES if you hadn't provided that? It is
possible to make DEFDOCUMENT an extensible macro like the MIT
implementation of LOOP but perhaps you're better of with a CLOS based
approach that has classes for each kind of item and a protocol to
display them or convert the document to an output medium. Symbolics
CONCORDIA worked like that but I don't know whether there is
documentation of it available on the net.
--
Lieven Marchand <···@bewoner.dma.be>
If there are aliens, they play Go. -- Lasker
On 12 Sep 1999 00:45:29 -0600, ········@unm.edu (Gavin E. Gleason) wrote:
> I've recently been thinking about what sort of syntax would be most useful
> and powerful for a document formatting system. My initial thought was about
[...]
> Any other suggestions are welcomed.
You might check LAML:
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~normark/laml/
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/