How to parse my own custom "programming language"?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all

I'm brain storming on ways how to optimize the act of writing good CSS... My plan is to create some sort of Meta-CSS-Language that is parsed by a translation-processor which outputs the "normal" CSS code (packed into a Ruby On Rails plugin).

I want to be able to write sort of the following quasi-CSS-code (the $-sign is sort of a placeholder for the surrounding context, see comments):

2

maybe erb would be of some help, to parse the file and replace stuff with ruby code http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/ERB.html

this would reduce your work to providing helpers and making rails run the css through erb (as all the html and rjs anyway)

3

Or you could look into Sass.

http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/docs/rdoc/classes/Sass.html

Peace, Phillip