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Basic structure of a rule-based program
Prerequisite Concepts		Related Syntax

OmniMark programs have a definite style which reflects the kind of programming you do with OmniMark. OmniMark is used for manipulating and transforming data, either as text or as markup and, in doing so, it responds to events which occur in the data. Since there is no way to predict in advance the order or relationships of data events, there is no way to predict the order of execution of an OmniMark program.

Many programming languages encourage nested code, with functions calling functions calling functions. This helps modularize functionality in a regular programming language. It also makes the execution path rigid and makes it difficult to react to complex sequences of events. OmniMark code is very flat. While you can define and use functions, they are used only within OmniMark's principal execution unit, the rule, and cannot contain rules themselves. All OmniMark rules exist at the base level of the program. In OmniMark you tend to find not nested code, but nested execution.

In processing complex markup, with many nested elements, rules are invoked at each level as appropriate. If you are seven layers of markup deep, seven rules are in mid-execution. This means that you do not have to maintain complex state tables or parse trees. The current execution state of the OmniMark program itself maintains the current parse state for you and makes it easily addressable.

Since you cannot tell in advance the order in which the execution of rules may be nested, nesting the rules themselves would make no sense. Hence the simplicity and flatness of a typical OmniMark program.