Making custom DSLs starting with "!" and "@"

[Abhijit Nandy <abhijit.nandy@...>]

Hi,

I want to support some custom syntax like the following in a Lua console I have implemented:

!ls -lrt

or 

@name{....}  

The exclamation mark and "@" are not valid Lua syntax so currently I detect them in the typed string and replace with valid Lua code - macro pre-processing.

But is there a way to make it valid given the flexibility of Lua to make DSLs.

Thanks

Abhijit