AION – a language for managing iCalendar data

Abstract

AION is a domain-specific language (DSL) that enables programmers to express calendar events and task logic in concise, text-based scripts and to export them directly to standard iCalendar (ICS) files. The language is defined in ANTLR-based grammar and interpreted by a TypeScript runtime that executes unchanged in both Node.js and modern browsers. Compared with point-and-click schedulers, AION reduces boilerplate, supports higher-order recurrence rules, and permits batch manipulation and filtering of large event sets. Benchmarks on a 14-week university timetable show that a 35-line script generates 7 000 VEVENTs in 230 ms on commodity hardware, yielding a 20 × reduction in authoring effort. The npm distribution allows seamless integration into web applications while avoiding server-side processing.