Fennelate is a proof of concept for a macro processor based on s-expressions. I was motivated to write it as I was looking for a light weight pre-processor for building static websites at the command line, but there is no reason not to use it as a general purpose macro processor.
As its name suggests, Fennelate utilises the Fennel programming language for its processing engine. Fennnel was chosen for its light footprint and for its ability to be embedded in Lua (and therefore C).
As a bonus for me, Fennel is also syntactically similar to the Clojure programming language, which I often use for server-side web development, but this was not a main motivator.
Build by running make at the root of the project directory.
This will produce the fnlate binary.
Fennelate requires liblua and lua5.4 C headers to be pre-installed
on your system. You may need to modify their paths for your system.
Fennelate is run using the command fnlate. It takes no arguements.
It just takes plaintext from stdin and puts to stdout.
A typical usage pipeline might look something like the following:
cat src/index.html.fnlt | fnlate | tidy > build/index.html
Any text between the <? and ?> tags is evaluated as a Fennel
expression, the output of which replaces the expression, including
the tags themselves.
In its current implementation, the expression must be separated from the tags by whitespace.
Examples of usage will follow. For now, read the source code if you want to know how the language works.