@aengelberg: made some progress this weekend with my instaparse project! https://github.com/adzerk-oss/zerkdown

it's a work in progress of course

it does a braindead parsing of clojure maps/vectors

https://github.com/adzerk-oss/zerkdown/blob/master/src/adzerk/zerkdown/grammar.ebnf

feedback appreciated

@micha this project is very cool

Does your ebnf allow [{]?

not in a :CLJ or :VEC block

["{"] would be ok though

<VEC-CHAR> = !(LSB | RSB | DQ) ANY-CHAR looks like it would allow mismatched map delimiters inside it

oh interesting

yeah it's ambiguous

!(LSB | RSB | STRING | MAP) ANY-CHAR would be nice there

then it would still allow mismatched quotes and delimiters because strings and maps don't successfully parse

hmm

maybe (!(LSB | RSB | LCB | RCB | DQ) ANY-CHAR) | STRING | CLJ

yeah

i will try that

i am planning to do the recursion from clojure btw

i will parse one level of indentation, then for each :BLOCK call insta again on the body

it seems like it will be straightforward, i hope

cool

Just make sure instaparse Failures are returned / shortcircuited properly

how do you mean?

if a "sub-parse" returns a failure, then what?

I imagine it will be most idiomatic to call insta/parse again within the transformer. But my point is, if a parse failure arises (malformed zerkdown) within that, you will need to propagate that error properly

ah right

what did you mean before about strings and maps not successfully parsing?

negative lookahead = make sure this thing does not successfully parse

!STRING x means no "complete well-formed strings" allowed, but you probably wanted "no double-quotes of any kind really"

and then you can add in | STRING to allow well-formed strings

oh i see

i actually don't care about double quotes

i just don't want well formed strings, because those can legitimately contain {}[] etc

i'm not trying to fully parse the clojure data, i just need to know where it ends

i send it as a string and use clojure.core/read-string on it later

that's fair, but if [{]}] is allowed it's not exactly obvious where it ends

haha yes

very interesting

anyway I don't think it's super hard to make the delimiters correct. (!(LSB | RSB | LCB | RCB | DQ) ANY-CHAR) | STRING | CLJ

That basically says "no double-quotes, UNLESS there is a well formed string"

yes that's awesome

testing was pretty easy to do, by configuring with different start rules

yeah. just don't forget negative testing

ah right

yeah i didn't think of that

really cool idea. what is the intended use case for zerkdown?

well i want to use it for just about everything!

mostly for websites

but i can imagine using it for literate programming and things like that

but for making webapps it's really nice to have a "prose" syntax you can customize for your use case

like normally you have like

# My Title

<h1>My Title</h1>

but what if you need something like

<h1>My Title <small>The Best Thing Ever</small></h1>

# My Title <<The Best Thing Ever>>

or even more complex things with behavior and everything, like forms and buttons