What is new in LAML

News in version 15:

1. The LAML configuration and installation procedure has been simplified. It is now easier to install LAML than in version 14.

2. The LAML systems has been extended with an HTML parser and a simple XML parser. Both of these are non-validating and generic. It means that they do not depend on any DTD information. The result of the parsers are LISP abstract syntax trees (see the XML parser for information about the format). The procedures html-parse and xml-parse are convenient high-level commands that allow you to parse HTML files and XML files.

   The HTML and XML parsers are still young, and there could be minor errors and inconveniences if you use them. I intend to use the XML parser for future XML interfaces to some LAML styles and tools. We provide both XML examples and HTML examples.

3. The procedure html-to-laml transforms an HTML file to the similar LAML file. This can be used as the first step in a (mainly manual) re-engineering procedure for conversion of HTML files to LAML.

4. Together with the parsers mentioned above, there is an HTML pretty printer and an XML pretty printer. Both pretty print the syntax trees produced by the parsers described above. The procedures html-pp and xml-pp are high level pretty printing command that are easy to use. The examples from above also illustrate the pretty printing capabilities (HTML, XML)

5. A parser and pretty printer for bibtex has been included. Bibtex is the bibliographic support for LaTeX. As of now, the bibtex pretty printer is still incomplete. The bibtex procedure is a convenient high level way of activating the bibtex support in LAML. Please also consult the bibtex examples. I use this stuff to handle my CV and other matters that require access to my bibtex file.

6. There is a new Scheme pretty printer in LAML. It can be used as a general pretty printer of Lisp files. However, there is particular support for the Scheme special forms. The scheme-pp procedure of the general LAML setup facility is a convenient high-level procedure for pretty printing of Scheme and Lisp files. This procedure preserves semicolon comments. The variant scheme-pp-simple does not preserve such comments. Therefore it is simpler, and it should be preferred for pretty printing of complicated Lisp expressions, such as syntax trees from the HTML and XML parsers.

7. The Emacs command M-x run-laml-interactively starts a Scheme interpreter from Emacs which - as the first thing - automatically loads the fundamental LAML support. Thus, in such as set up, you can immediately use the most fundamental LAML stuff.

8. The Emacs command M-x unembed is a natural inverse operation of embed. These two Emacs commands are very important for easy and secure authoring of LAML material from Emacs. The unembed command is new. Both are described in the Emacs support overview of the overall index file.

9. If you use LAML from outside Emacs there is now a simplified way of loading LAML into your scheme system.

10. Please also notice the new paper on LAML: A Programmatic Approach to WWW Authoring using Functional Programming (postscript, pdf) which is available from the LAML home page.

Besides the major improvemens listed above, a lot of small improvements have been made throughout the styles, tools, and libraries. See a more detailed log for further details. Notice however that some changes has been performed without any logging...

Kurt Nørmark
Aalborg University
normark@cs.auc.dk