This project should be considered as a work in progress. At this stage, it is far from robust, and should be treated as a learning exercise for writing parsers in C, rather than anything suitable for use in a production environment.
Please see the TODO file for a list of future plans for this project, and tasks which could be accomplished by an interested contributor.
The overall aim of this project is to create an object notation syntax based upon the Lua programming language. Analogous to JSON for JavaScript, this would be based upon a subset of Lua's syntax, allowing for the representation of objects, but preventing unwanted execution of arbitrary code when interpreted.
There's probably no compelling reason to use a Lua-based object syntax over JSON or even XML, other than personal preference or interoperability with an existing Lua codebase.
This project was originally created with the intention of using it to read metadata for a software package system which already made considerable use of Lua for its installation scripts.
The process of building this code on a UNIX-like system is quite straight-
forward. Clone the git repository, and cd into the working directory.
You'll need to make sure you have the CMake build system and a C compiler installed on your system. The CMakeLists.txt file in this project uses LLVM/Clang as its default compiler, but you can change this back to your system's default C compiler by commenting out the relevant lines in the file.
To begin, run the cmake command to create Makefiles, then run the make
command to begin compiling the library and its associated tests.
You can now start programming against the library (see include/lon.h for the
API reference), and run the test application: ./tests/lex_test.