XML

Xml May-be Lisp

XML esque programming language. The acronym isn't recursive. requires python3.10 (due to use of match statements)

To see it in action just run core.py.

hello world example

<print>
    <lit> "Hello, World!" </lit>
</print>

syntax notes

literal and names

names are just empty tags like <x /> or <x></x>. literals are a little more complicated, they are text only tags. The text they contain is passed to python's ast.literal_eval so they have to follow the same rule as pythons literals, though with restrictions. there are some examples below;

<block>
    <!-- int !-->
    <lit> 69 </lit>
    <!-- float !-->
    <lit> 420.0 </lit>
    <!-- string !-->
    <lit> "spam, eggs, foo, bar, baz" </lit>
    <!-- complex !-->
    <lit> 3 + 1j </lit>
    <!-- bytes !-->
    <lit> b"\xca\xfe\xba\xbe" </lit>
</block>

other literals from python are also supported, though their use is not tested, at all.

function calls

Function calls are done via adding child nodes to a node. This only supports directly calling functions. This makes the language feel more like a Lisp dialect, so f(x) is written closer to (f x) with <f><x /></f>.

builtins and preludes

XML has a few builtin functions like <print />, <block />, <list />, <map />, and <import />.

• <print /> and <list /> are just wrappers around the equivalent python functions. <list /> is modified to act like (*args) => [*args] because it allows for <list> <x /> <y /> <z /> </list> which is nice.
• <map /> is like the python builtin map, only it returns a list.
• <block /> takes any number of arguments, evaluates all of them and returns the result of the last one.
• <import /> currently isn't fully implemented, it can only import python moduless currently. Imports currently look like <import> <external /> <somePythonModule /> </import>.

XML also has a few functions imported by default in its prelude library. This includes pythons operator library, aswell as getattr, setattr, and range.

examples

examples can be found in the examples folder and can be ran via the xmli.py script.