These are sanitized (spelling-corrected, fragments deleted, formatted for the Web) excerpts from the original newsgroup posts of a conversation between Juanca and me. Note that the details of the language have changed since then. The original posts appeared at news://news.optimax.com/sdforum.want. They are reproduced here for historical purposes only. -AJW 2008/08/05

My Original Post

From: "Andrew [Wozniewicz]"
Newsgroups: sdforum.want
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 9:55 PM
Subject: Re: WANT to go forward

I want [WANTScript] to be expressive and not overly verbose, but at the same time readable, in the Pascal tradition.

So here is an imaginary, very short WANTSript, by way of example (It is not complete, and is only meant to illustrate the syntax):

project ProjectName;

  using BuildLib;

  const
    PublishDest = "c:\wherever\dest\";

  target Compile
    depends Init, Prepare, Resources;
    perform RCC with
      Source += Resources + "\rc\*.rc";
      Output :=
    end;
    perform DCC with
      HugeStrings :+ True;
      Optimization :+ False;
      Include += "dcu";
      Include += "lib\**";
      Exclude += "bin\**";
    end;
    WriteLn("Done compiling");
  end;

  target Publish
    depends Compile, Test;
    perform Copy with
      Source += BINDir + "*.exe"
      Destination := PublishDest;
    end;
    Notify("Published to "+PublishDest);
  end;

  procedure Notify(Message);
    perform EMail with
      AddrTo := "recipient@domain.com";
      AddrFrom := "wantscript@domain.com";
      AddrCC := "juanca@whereverheis.com"; 
      Subject := "Notification from WANT";
      Body := Message;
    end;
  end;

end;

Tell me what you think.

Andrew

Juanca's Response :-)

From: "Juancarlo Añez"
Newsgroups: sdforum.want
Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2007 11:24 PM
Subject: Re: WANT to go forward

Andrew,

I hate it!

Please take a look at JSON for a minimalistic yet expressive language.

I'd really, really go with a established scripting language (in fact, JavaScript, though not statically typed, seems good). You'd get an interpreter for trying things out for free, a reasonable regular expression library, lists, sets, and maps...

Juanca

I am sorry to report that WANTScript is currently taking shape more along the lines of what my original post suggested, than along those that Juanca advocates. -AJW 2008/08/05