I want to write a macroprocessor. So far I've done a very simple sketch of how it should look and I came to the conclusion that inventing a completely new language would not be a good idea but I should reuse existing concepts. My sketch so far is a kind of irb with some tex-alike syntax and features, but I'm not sure what I should use as ruby-substitute. The language should be simple, yet powerful. I don't want to write an OS in it, but it should be less "raw" than e.g. bc or forth. I don't care about execution time at all. Embedding should not be too hard and it'll be nice if the language itself was stable.
So far I've considered these:
- Lua - It should process text easily. Lua does not even have a
while(c=getchar()){}. I'm skeptic. - awk - Simple, text processing is easy, but never intended for embedding
- perl - Way to complex, stable, but it seems almost dead.
- python - Significant whitespaces; won't they get in the way for inlined function-definitions?
- groovy/nice/java - Hard/impossible to embed? Also way to heavy.
- javascript - Really like it (besides DOM) but is there a stable/embeddable implementation? I don't want to mess around with the api every 2 weeks when there's a new v8 version. As I said, I don't care about execution time.
I have not really found any pros/cons for
- io
- guile/scheme
- TCL
Update: The language should have features such as function-definition, library-loading or regexps (loops would also be very nice) I don't want to use a traditional macro-language such as M4 because I want to able to write in a more procedural (or maybe functional) style. Macro languages have their pros, but I requires a completely new way of thinking about a problem which is hard especially for beginners. My Aim is to use the best of both worlds.
