Why I'm learning Flex and Bison

[Steve Litt]

Hi all,

Since about 2014 I've been trying to create a new language for authors.
I call the language Stylz. Unlike Markdown, when complete, Stylz will
enable the author to make up his own styles. Like Plain TeX, LaTeX and
Markdown, paragraphs are separated by one or more blank lines. Stylz
written books will be convertable to HTML, ePub, Plain TeX, PDF,
and pretty much anything else that comes along. Without using Pandoc.
Stylz will be built from the ground up for lightning fast authoring
using any editor, no mouse required. Because speed is of the essence,
paragraphs and headings have no closing tags, and character styles use
a right squiggly brace as a closing tag.

With a great deal of help from this mailing list, today I took my first
baby step: A converter that takes a document with blank line separated
paragraphs, and puts <p> tags at the paragraph start and </p> tags at
the end of the paragraph. I cheated by using a simple Python
preprocessor that stripped off all blank lines before the start of the
content, stripped trailing space off every line, and adding two
newlines to the end to correctly facilitate the necessary break logic
in my converter. I'll display the converter in another post.

Thank you all very much for helping me. Flex and Bison are very
difficult for someone, like me, who has not a clue about them or the
whole compilation process. Your help was absolutely essential.

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt 

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21