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.
