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

[John Fraser]

On Mar 1, 2008, at 1:19 PM, david parsons wrote:

>> I agree that Markdown needs to be defined unambiguously, but I don't

>> think that's feasible with plain English in the loop.  For something

>> as complex and flighty as Markdown, we need working code.

>

>    I'm not so sure about this.   I managed to write a markdown

>    implementation without using anything other than the daring  

> fireball

>    syntax document and MarkdownTest_1.0.   And I am by no means a

>    Perl programmer.



Okay, but I'd argue that your success had a lot more to do with the  
test suite than the syntax document.

I'll admit it: I'm probably more suspicious of paper specs than I  
should be.  But I can't help thinking that (1) any natural-language  
Markdown spec will have holes; (2) any test suite will have littler  
holes; and (3) the most popular implementation will always be the de  
facto standard.

My JavaScript port of Markdown needs to match up perfectly with a  
server-side version in order to be useful, so I'm probably a little  
more sensitive to underspecification than most.  But a spec's not  
worth much if implementations aren't interchangeable.  And since  
Markdown has to continue silently when it gets confused, we'd need to  
define all the corner cases completely -- or risk locking users into a  
particular reading of the spec.

I'm all for writing a specification, but I think its purpose should be  
to inform and to justify a reference implementation and test suite.

- John Fraser