Comment by Decabytes

10 hours ago

S-expressions are a cheap dsl too. I use it in my desktop browser runtime that is powered by wasm that I’m developing As the “HTML”^1 and CSS^2 in fact it works so well I use it also reused it to do the styling for html exports in my markup language designed to fight documentation drift^3.

1. https://gitlab.com/canvasui/canvasui-engine/-/blame/main/exa...

2. https://gitlab.com/canvasui/canvasui-engine/-/blob/main/exam...

3. https://gitlab.com/sablelang/libcuidoc

S-expressions are great. They are trivial to implement parsers for. For a while I used S expression parsing and evaluation as a technical coding screen interview question because it is feasible to implement a functional (pun intended) programming language using S-expressions in the space of an interview.

While not the point of the interview, the best part for me was seeing a candidate’s face light up when they realized they implemented a working programming language.