I Discovered Skribilo!

Jun 29, 2023 (IST)

Skribilo is a way to interleave markup and scheme code, with very similar semantics to what I was envisioning in Lispy Templates:

It uses ,( to evaluate code inside a markup block.
It uses square brackets (‘[…]’)for content blocks instead of quotes.

Skribilo actually supports multiple types of syntax, since it’s more of a framework for defining your own syntax. The syntax it uses by default is the Skribe syntax, which has its origins in LAML roughly as far back as 1999, as per this paper by Kurt Nørmark.

The Skribilo page also mentions a lot of prior art and similar projects at the bottom, which might be interesting to look at.

Here’s an example of a Skribe document:

(define (skribilo . body)
  (ref :url "https://www.nongnu.org/skribilo/" :text body))

(document :title [I Discovered Skribilo!]
          :draft #t
          :date (make-date 0 0 28 10 29 06 2023 0) ;(nanosecond second minute hour day month year timezone-offset)

  (p [,(skribilo [Skribilo]) is a way to interleave markup and scheme code,
with very similar semantics to what I was envisioning in
,(ref "@/lispy-templates.skribe" "Lispy Templates").]))

At this stage, I think all it needs is a way to define syntax sugar (like # title or - list item), and it would be roughly on par with typst.