Re: Another gsoc idea -- ragel

[Eric Schulte <eric.schulte@gmx.com>]

Thorsten <quintfall@googlemail.com> writes:

> Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Ragel http://www.complang.org/ragel/ is a tool that integrates regular
>> expressions and state machines under one umbrella.
>> It has backends currently for C, C++, Objective-C, D, Java and Ruby. 
>> I do not think having an elisp backend would be a very big task.
>>
>> After that (in my estimate) org-mode code would (could) become half as
>> long and twice as fast -- at least those sections that are heavily
>> regex oriented
>
> I took the freedom to add your (slightly modified) proposal to the GSoC
> 2012 ideas page:
> http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/gsoc2012/orgmode-gsoc2012-ideas.html

Perhaps related to this proposal would be a project to formally specify
Org-mode's syntax.  I'm thinking this could be an extension of the truly
remarkable formalization work recently undertaken by Nicolas in support
of his Org-mode AST representation and exporter, but with more of a
focus on specification in such a way as to facilitate developing
Org-mode parsers in other languages, be they Ragel, OCaml [1], VIM [2],
Haskell (e.g., pandoc [3]), or scripting languages to allow exporting
without Emacs (e.g., a replacement for org-ruby [4]) for use at github,
wikis or any website in which Emacs is too large of a dependency.

Cheers,

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/52736

[2]  http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3342

[3]  http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

[4]  http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-ruby.html

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/