Formal Grammar — some thoughts

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Allan Odgaard <29mtuz102 at sneakemail.com> [2006-07-31 03:35]:

> Well, yes, a lot more can be done. But I think the energy would

> be better spent trying to move toward a more formal grammar and

> more standard parsing mechanisms. This is quite a challenge,

> and it can’t be done without revising some parts of the syntax,

> OTOH the problematic parts (e.g. nested block elements)


You keep asserting that, and it keeps failing to make any sense.
The big difference between grammars and regular expressions (in
the proper CS sense, not the way more powerful things that Perl
calls regular expressions) is that grammars can express nested
constructs. I wonder what you are talking about.


> is often not handled consistently (or properly) by the current

> implementation, so I’d think it would be possible to tweak this

> a bit.


That only means the current implementations need to be fixed.

John has stated in the past, and I agree with him, that questions
of implementation matter only in that it has to be *possible* for
a computer to parse Markdown.

Being easy to parse is not a feature. Readability is.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>