Highlighter Syntax

You read that right: this is not syntax highlighter, this is highlighter syntax: a programming language where the markup of the letters define their function in the language. While there are esoteric languages where the color is the programming language (a red letter could mean "output a value", disregarding the letter entirely), I haven't seen one where the color defines only the syntax.

Language design

This is so far only a thought experiment, but with some ideas:

1. In structure, the syntax will be familiar to the C-inspired programming languages.
2. Color, not characters, will determine the function of a token.
3. Keywords are also to be avoided as much as possible.
4. Tokens are separated by whitespace or by using different colors.
5. Language purity is more important than adding functionality or syntactic sugar, but it should at least be somewhat usable.

This will hopefully evolve over time as this goes along.

Reference implementation

When looking for a reference implementation, I needed a platform for both markup and code, so a browser was to me the most obvious choice. The reference implementation will be developed in this repository, along with a IDE WYSIWYG editor with a button to run it.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to sabik for giving me the inspiration in this toot!