Meta-language for mxTextTools

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Tony J. Ibbs (Tibs) wrote:
> 
> I am aiming to use Marc-André Lemburg's mxTextTools package for an
> application in my (hah!) spare time. Being me, the first thing I've set out
> to do is to provide the missing meta-language so that I can avoid typing in
> the tag tables as "bare" tuples.
> 
> What I've done so far is to produce an alpha version of the meta-language
> documentation, which can be found at
> 
>     http://www.tibsnjoan.demon.co.uk/mxtext/metalang.html
> 
> Translations of the examples from the mxTextTools distribution are also
> supplied.
> 
> I still have to actually *implement* the thing (I expect to do this with
> mxTextTools itself, with appropriate hand-bootstrapping), but since I'm
> about to go off on holiday for a couple of weeks, it seems worth
> "publishing" my thoughts so far and getting any comments.
> 
> Note that I am *not* claiming that this is a particularly sophisticated
> animal, nor that it is necessarily the best beast that could be dreamt of -
> just that it is something I can work with and should be easy to implement.

This looks very promising :-)

One itch that I have with the syntax: since you are
already using Pythonish syntax, why not simply write

def keyword:
    ...

instead of

keyword is:
    ...

An alias "back" for -1 would help reading the tables:

Skip back 
vs.
Skip -1

Hmm, I guess Tim will like this ;-)

Cheers,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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