[O] mlorg : yet another parser for org-mode (Written in OCaml contained in org-mode files)

[Simon Castellan]

Hello,

I have been writing a parser for mlorg files in OCaml. This started as an
experiment to see if the literate programming mode of org-mode could scale to a
full application (among other things).

The project is at its beginning but can « bootstrap » itself (that is parses its
own source and extract the source code), yet the support for the syntax is very
far from being complete.

The goal is also to be able to convert org-mode files to latex/html/... without
having the dependancy on emacs. Indeed although org-mode files are just plain
text, there is still a feeling of being locked because this is such a
complicated format and that there doesn't seem to be a reference library to deal
with this. I hope that more libraries to do so will appear for one main reason :
to have a standard syntax we can build upon : I think that to know precisely the
syntax understood by org-mode is very difficult : no document about this exists
(Or I have found none). When I'm done with the main syntaxic part I will try to
document them.

Besides, I think org-mode is wonderful editor but does a terrible job at
exporting : slow, emacs-specific, strange errors on some document, ...

The code can be found on gitorious:
  http://gitorious.org/mlorg/mlorg

For those who would like to compile, you will need the batteries library from
git (hope it will be released before mlorg has reached a releasable state).

An example of cool feature that I have added in mlorg and that should be the
org-mode exporter : org-mode doesn't put location annotations (à la cpp) so that
compilers know how to report correct line numbers. This is very helpful when
compiling quite long files.

The point of this message is mainly to attract people interested in testing or
even contributing. (I will be very glad : there is so much to do). But I hope to
make the org-mode community think about a standardization process of the syntax
used in org-mode to ease the work of parsers mainteners. There is no README yet,
but the mlorg binary doesn't do much yet and the code should be self-documented
(I hope so).

Simon.