evolving the spec (was: forking Markdown.pl?)

[Tomas Doran]

On 29 Feb 2008, at 16:52, Thomas Nichols wrote:

> Cases in point:

>  * Feynman

>  * Dirac

>  * Bohr

>

> without thinking about inserting an extra line before the list to  

> ensure that it gets correctly processed, aligning asterisks with  

> zero indent so they get correctly processed, yada yada. Part of the  

> joy of markdown (that sounds a little over-caffeinated) is  

> precisely the laxity that makes it, I gather, so hard to implement.


That is also how I do it. :)

When I mentioned in a previous mail on the thread that I have found  
lists one of the hardest cases, I wasn't joking, as I consider this  
to be a valid case (albeit very much a psychotic edge case), and I'd  
expect it to do "the right thing":

    * L1I1
       1. L2I1
       2. L2I2
   * L1I2
    * L1I3
        * L3I1
       * L3I2


> Please bear in mind I know nothing about the implementation  

> complexity of this: if it is infeasible to have such a loose  

> approach, I'll still write in Markdown instead of DocBook/HTML, and  

> will simply learn the "new" syntax.


I, personally, feel that trading implementation complexity for  
'correctness' and ease of use is a good trade off in Markdown!

Getting a parser that is loose enough to do "the right thing" in the  
above edge case is much less trivial than writing a strict parser,  
but *well worth it*.

Cheers
Tom