Babel: Languages

Note: Many languages in this table still require documentation. A template is provided in the worg git repository for the addition of language documentation.

To add support for a particular language to your Babel installation first make sure that the requirements of the language are met, then you may customize the org-babel-load-languages variable, update the variable's value manually by adding¹

(lang . t)

to its definition. A line like the following to explicitly remove support for a language.

(lang . nil)

Here is an example manual configuration of this variable, which enables support for R, and disables support for emacs-lisp.

;; active Babel languages
(org-babel-do-load-languages
 'org-babel-load-languages
 '((R . t)
   (emacs-lisp . nil)
   ))

The core Babel functions (viewing, export, tangling, etc…) are language agnostic and will work even for languages that are not explicitly supported. Explicit language-specific support is required only for evaluation of code blocks in a language.

Babel is designed to be easily extended to support new languages. Language support is added by defining language-specific functions using a simple naming convention. The full suite of possible language specific functions need not be implemented all at once, but rather it is possible (and encouraged) to develop language-specific functionality in an incremental fashion – Babel will make use of those functions which are available, and will fail gracefully when functionality has not yet been implemented.

There is a short Emacs Lisp template (ob-template.el) which can be used as a starting point for implementing support for new languages. Developers are encouraged to read the Org-mode contribution instructions in the hope that the language support can be included into the Org-mode core.