More and more since I began development on Dash, particularly templating in Dash, I have wanted to write a new parser for PHP.
When I say a new parser for PHP, I don't mean to parse PHP. No I mean to parse Dash Templates. This will give me the power to include features like if statements and loops as well as a lot of other stuff.
At present, templates look like:
<div class="image">{POST_IMAGE}</div>
{POST_CONTENT}
But as you can see that means that it doesn't matter if a {POST_IMAGE} is set or not, it will display no matter what. What if it could work like this:
{IF POST_IMAGE}
<div class="image">{POST_IMAGE}</div>
{END IF}
{POST_CONTENT}
Since I wrote ZPE and then rewrote the Zenith Parser to be completely open and usable by others, I have written a JSON, XML and CSV parser to go with the original ZenLang parser. It's fair to say I have a good idea about making an efficient parser now.
If statements would make it easier to do things that we couldn't do before. So that's next for Dash, whether it makes it to version 1.0 or not I'm not entirely sure but I hope so since it shouldn't take too long.
On top of that, I'm thinking about making it free from Dash and completely separate, thus allowing it to be used elsewhere.
