Life is ticking over nicely, work is boring (which is fine, better than many kinds of exciting).

I've added a calendar to the front page of the site, not sure what to do with it Could obviously link to blog day entries, could probably put in moon phases, but I don't think I'd use with of those.

Read a post today that used CSS like syntax for SVG, which got me thinking.

I'm a big fan of SVG. I love the declarative nature of the format ("Draw a circle" vs. "pixel, pixel, pixel"), as well as being able to write it in notepad.

On other other hand, like all XML dialects, it's a bit wordy. I can't find the link, but a while ago I read an article that showed how easy it is to map XML to Lisp.

Roughly, an XML node is a name with a list of attributes and children, where attributes are 2-element lists, and children are either nodes or strings.

<svg><circle x="40" y="40" r="17" /></svg>

(node "svg" () ((node "circle" (("x" "40") ("y" "40") ("r" "17")) ()))

I've had a bit of a poke at mal and it's actually feeling like it's a real thing.

I've got a few things I could do next, it needs a better UI for the repl, I could build it again in JS (to run here in the frontend), I could build it again in C and compile to wasm (to get exactly the same code running front and back), and I could handle mal code blocks with the C# engine.

The cli needs readline like stuff - at least basic cursor movement. Ideally, it would stash the environment (and history) at exit and load again at start, with some way of editing (i.e., save to mal code).

Rewriting in C would probably be a bugger, although there's always Crafting Interpreters to fall back on (it's got dynamic lists, rough polymorphism, even a garbage collector!).

Rewriting in JS would be easier, and I could use quickJS to run/test on the server (which is mildly horrific, but that's life in 2022 baby!), but I'm still on the fence about JS. It's nice that there's common language in browsers, but did it have to be that one?)

I'll have a stab at writing in C, trying to use as little libc as I can get away with (realloc, printf, probably some string comparison stuff, I'll check the book later) and see if that's a realistic option.

(I'm going to end up with Lisp interpreted by wasm calling out to JavaScript for IO. Groovy.)