What is it?
MEML is a simple programing language with the intent of making static webpages easier to write. The following two design principles guide language design:
- Conciseness: HTML is far to verbose, leading to a lot of extra characters with limited purpose.
- Reusability: The main feature of react used in static sites is components, to reduce code duplication. MEML attempts to provide a similar component (although static) system
This leads to a language that looks something like this:
(head
(title "Hello World")
)
(body
(h1 "Hello World")
)
Which translates to
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World</title>
<head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World</h1>
</body>
</html>
Components can be used for shared code, for example nav.meml:
(component Nav ()
(nav
(div "Page 1")
(div "Page 2")
(div "Page 3")
)
)
(export (Nav))
index.meml
(import (Nav) from './nav.meml')
(head
(title "Hello World")
)
(body
(Nav)
(h1 "Hello World")
)
Installation and usage
Recommendation: Using memlc gets clunky with larger projects, try using mld instead.
Before you install, make sure you have both node and npm on your computer. Create a folder that you want your MEML project to be in and run npm init to set it up.
Then install the development version of MEML by running:
npm install meml
On MacOS and Linux, you may need to run
sudo npm install meml
You can then run it with
npx memlc --file [fileName]
Source and out directories
There are very few cases where you want the output of memlc to be dumped in the same folder as your source files. To handle this, memlc offers both --src and --out flags. When you set both of these flags, --file will now be relative to --src and the outputs will be dumped in --out. For example:
npx memlc --file ./src/index.meml # Will output in ./src/index.html
# Becomes
npx memlc --src ./src/ --file index.meml --out ./public/ # Will output in ./public/index.html
Boring legal stuff
MemlC Copyright (C) 2021 Fushra & Fivnex
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. For more information see the license file.