on the philosophical aspects of a specification

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2008-03-03 à 6:36, Aristotle Pagaltzis a écrit :


> Why then does the fallacious argument that a spec would represent

> a loss for the user continue?


Some people have proposed before that some constructs may not be  
outlawed, that syntax rules should be changed, that Markdown is either  
too clever or not clever enough. People have been pushing a spec for a  
lot of reasons, and thus the consequences of writing a spec have  
become much more confusing.

Here's my take on it:

I don't think Markdown should be changed, we just need a spec to avoid  
each implementation from implementing "cleverness" in incompatible  
manners. Let's specify exactly how things *are* parsed now, minus the  
bugs.

(Note that by how things *are* parsed now, I'm not talking about  
specifying in english how Markdown.pl works; I'm talking about having  
the same result from a given input. Just making sure I'm not adding  
more unneeded confusion to that part of the discussion.)


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/