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Cameron
Cameron

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Building My Own Markdown Compiler (1/?)

After spending a lot of time on gwern.net which was written in Haskell, and reading Matthew Butterick's e-books, which were written in a markup lang built in Racket, I've decided that there are certain custom features I want from Markdown for personal website reasons that aren't provided in the vanilla spec. So, as is the novice dev way a lot of the time, I decided it'd be a fun learning experience to write my own website compiler. I'm currently reading Realm of Racket to get acquainted with the language, and plan on reading Beautiful Racket (by Butterick) afterwards, as trying to read the latter without some sort of primer or foundational knowledge was a little dry and overwhelming. I also think it's just much easier for me to read on my Kindle than it is to internalize the same info through a computer screen.

In the spirit of Realm of Racket, I've decided to chronicle my adventures here, and keep a log of the things that I enjoyed, as well as the things that slowed me down or acted as obstacles.

Et cetera:

  • Large exponents (e.g. 50 ^ 50) are calculated flawlessly in Racket for reasons I don't yet understand, which is immensely neat.
  • I think learning Racket could be a great intro into learning Clojure, which I also want to do.

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