Tiramisu

A delightful language for structured textual data.

Goals

Tiramisu aims to be a lightweight, parsable, verbose yet readable and understandable, extensible, and flexible technical writing and documentation language.

Obviousness

A first-timer reading the following Markdown code won't know what's going on:

**xyz**
_xyz_
**xyz**
_xyz_
[abc](https://abc.com)

Comapre the above with the equivalent Tiramisu code:

bold { xyz }
italic { xyz }
link { abc, to = https://abc.com }

Parsable

Markdown is not context-free and not easily parsable. Tiramisu is easily parsable by an LL parser.

Extensible

Tiramisu is extensible. You can write custom "translators" to compile Tiramisu into ANYTHING. You can also plug in your custom functions without needing to modify the language parser or grammar.

Language Guide

Tiramisu has two modes:

1. Text Mode: Anything written outside but not before curly braces is considered text. Textual tokens that are not separated by more than one line break are grouped like paragraphs.

2. Function Mode: A function starts with a function name and a pair of curly braces right after the function name. Functions accept four types of parameters, separated by ",":

   • Simple parameters: Any text or function call. You can escape special characters with or use the escape {} macro.

   • Strings: If there are too many characters to escape in your simple parameter, or you don't want to use escape, then you can wrap your text in double quotes: "like this".

   • Arrays: Arrays are comma "," separated lists of strings or simple parameters. You can use square brackets to define an array.

   • Named parameters: In the form of name = value where value can be a simple parameter, a string, or an array.

Available Functions

Tiramisu doesn't define ANY functions by default. The escape macro has the exact syntax as a function but it gets evaluated on parse-time. Tiramisu leaves the choice of functions to distributions, target language translators, and applications building on Tiramisu. For example, a documentation generator based on Tiramisu can define

• bold { this is italic { bold and italic } }
• chart { import { data.json } }
• map { x = dummy, y = dummy }

functions.

Example

See example.tiramisu.