# $Id: README,v 1.4 2002/12/18 13:40:14 flux Exp $

   Zoem is an interpreter for an interpretive language which is called,
   as things go, zoem. From the Zoem User Manual:

      Zoem is an interpretive macro language with substantial facilities for
      programming. It supports a two-stage process, consisting of macro
      interpretation (featuring inside-out evaluation if needed), followed by a
      simple and powerful application of stream character filtering.

      Its syntax is remindful of \it{TeX}'s, it has dictionary stacks like
      \it{PostScript}, and various resemblances to \it{m4} and \it{info}.  It
      has interfaces to modules making life easy \- counters, references,
      arithmetic, multi-dimensional data storage, input/output operations,
      regular expressions, and system commands.

      Zoem is used for creating extendible dummy mark-up languages and mapping
      those to real mark-up languages.  The dummy languages have all the power
      of the zoem primitives available to them.  A prime application is the
      creation of little mark-up languages that allow easy preparation of
      documents for use with different devices.  Examples are the PUD \bf{faq}
      language and the PUD \bf{man} language, both of which can be used to
      generate troff output and html output. PUD stands for Portable Unix
      Documentation and is shipped with Aephea.  Aephea itself is an
      abstraction layer for creating concise and maintainable HTML documents.

   The version tag, which is of the form dd-ddd, encodes the year and
   day in year in which the distribution was made. So 02-058 encodes the
   58-th day of the year 2002.

   See LICENSE for copyright and licensing, see THANKS for contributors,
   see INSTALL for generic installation instructions.
