Sugar - The Markup Language With Invisible Syntactic Sugar ========================================================== Title: Sugar - The Markup Language With Invisible Syntactic Sugar Author: Ralf S. Engelschall Author: Christian Reiber Genesis: 12-Mar-1999 Date: 26-Jun-2000 Introduction ------------ Me & you Sugar is a markup language and corresponding translator tool for writing technical documentation that uses mostly invisible markup tags (the so-called //syntactic sugar// in compiler construction folk terminology). See ->foo<- **foo** The general idea is that the markup text looks already like the textual output of the translator phase, that is, the Sugar source can be already treated as its text output format ("ASCII WYSIWYG"). Additionally the Sugar markup language is considered intuitive enough to be recognized easily, so writing technical documentation is mainly just a matter of performing a brain dump. (+foo+) || Special Block For testing o. foo bar o baz1 o baz2 -. quux purposes only. So Sugars syntactic principle is "keep it simple'n'stupid" (KISS) but still powerful enough to allow one to produce high-quality output. Sugars goal is not to **provide** all features of a full featured documentation system. Instead it provides only a few markup concepts but those are streched to a **maximum. Sugar Grammar ------------- A Sugar document is described by the following grammar: ++ table foo bar quux where is defined visually as a rectangular block of continued text inside the document, that is a paragraph of ** BOLD TEXT text (without any blank lines) where each line starts at the same ** BOLD TEXT A SECOND TIME indentation position.