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The below is a chapter from a short book I am working on. Feedback appreciated

Particle Syntax (Particles) is a minimal syntax for parsing documents.

What is a syntax? Think of it like a set of rules that tell you how to split a document into components and what to label those components. Particles fits in the category of syntaxes that includes XML, S-Expressions, JSON, TOML or YAML.

Particles is unique in that it is the most minimal of these.

How minimal is Particles? Very! The file below uses everything in the syntax:

post title Particles

Particles divides a document into 3 kinds of things:

• Atoms
• Particles
• Subparticles

Atoms are just words. A word is just a sequence of visible characters (no spaces in words). The document above has 3 atoms: "post", "title", and "Particles". In Particles, atoms are separated by a single space. Particles has no understanding of what these words mean. Particles does not have the concept of number, for example. Every visible character in Particles is just part of an atom and that's it. If you have the line a b, that would be be split into 2 atoms, "a" and "b". If you were to add an extra space a b, that would now be 3 atoms, "a", "", and "b". So an atom can be of length 0.

The particles in Particles contain 2 things: a list of atoms, and optionally, a list of subparticles.

Subparticles are just particles that belong to a parent particle.

In the example above, the particle starting with "post" is actually a subparticle of the root particle, which is the document itself.

The particle starting with "title" is a subparticle of the particle starting with "post".

The particle starting with "title" has 2 atoms, "title" and "Particles", and zero subparticles.

The particle starting with "post" has 1 atom, "post", and 1 subparticle.

You make one particle a subparticle of another by indenting it one more space than it's parent particle. If we deleted the space before "title", then the line beginning with "title" would become the second subparticle of the root particle, and the line beginning with "post" would have zero subparticles. If we added another space before "title", that line would still be a subparticle of the "post" particle, and all that would change would be that we added a blank atom at the beginning of that particle's atoms list, and it would now have three atoms.

if true print Hello world a b c

Now you should understand the basics of what Particle Syntax is. In the next chapter we'll look at why Particles is so useful.