Monday, October 28, 2013

Termcat: Random Remarks

Current Feature-Set

Here's what Termcat can currently do.

Words can be emphasized by writing *italics* for italics. Sentences or sentence fragments can be emphasized *(like this)*. The outermost parentheses are automatically removed: like this. There's also syntax for **bold** and _underlined_ text.

Blockquotes are created by indenting text using two spaces.

Bullet lists are created like this:

- This is notation
- for bullet
  list.

As demonstrated above, bullet items can be continued on a new line by indenting those subsequent lines with two spaces. Bullet lists can also be nested and bullet items may contain blockquotes or multiple paragraphs.

Numbered lists are created like this:

:numbered-list
- item 1
- item 2

Termcat actually interprets this as the (curried) function call :numbered-list(item 1)(item 2). In fact, all syntactic sugar is translated into such function calls. For example, *this* is actually rewritten as :emph(this).

Fun fact. A sentence fragment can also be italicized by writing this:

:emph
  this is a function argument, not a blockquote

or

:emph
- this is not a real bullet item

The reason for this is that bullet items, indented blocks, as well as text in parentheses or other brackets are internally represented as the same thing. Hence writing :foo(bar)(baz), :foo[bar]{baz}, or

:foo
- bar
- baz

all amount to the same thing.

Links are created using the syntax [Text](http://example.com).

Images are created like this: ![Alt text](example.jpg)

Finally, there's support for creating section titles:

# This is a section title (h1)
## This is a subsection title (h2)

Planned Features

I have implemented rudimentary support for mathematical equations. There are still a lot of details to work out, though, and I hope to finish this work by the end of this week.

I have also started thinking about a Termcat-JavaScript interface. Specifically, I'd love it if existing JavaScript components could be reused in Termcat. I'm not sure what the interface for that should look like, though.

Zach, one of the Hacker School facilitators, pointed me to x-tags (which is inspired by web components) and this might be one way out. If I dictated that JavaScript code should be called via x-tags then I wouldn't have to add much more to Termcat than the ability to output arbitrary HTML tags. Nevertheless, I'm not sure x-tags is the answer. For instance, I think that x-tags / web components syntax is not well-suited for describing graphs, whereas in LaTeX graphs can be somewhat elegantly described using PGF/TikZ.

Related Work

In my previous blog post I mentioned that there seemed to be a link between my rewriting rules and finite state automata. To that I want to add that there are also clear links to concatenative programming in that the input and output of every rewriting rule solely consists of pop and push operations on a stack. (Kudos to Vlad for that link.)

David, another Hacker School facilitator, pointed me to an interesting research and pedagogic program under the name 'nanopass compiler'. The idea in this program is to construct compilers out of many passes that each perform one kind of simple transformation. Sounds like a rewriting system to me! The big difference with the Termcat rewriting system seems to be that in a nanopass compiler you construct a formal grammar for every intermediate language, whereas I don't have a formal grammar at any point.