On 5/04/2013, at 2:00 PM, Johan Tibell wrote: >> Would it be too much to ask that a notation be used which has >> a formal syntax and a formal semantics? > > We will document our superset, sure. That's what others did as well. > The point is using Markdown as the shared base.
Nononono. Sure, the others "documented" their supersets. But they did *NOT* provide what I am asking for: - a FORMAL SYNTAX and - a FORMAL SEMANTICS. I tried to use one of these systems, and found myself unable to determine which combinations of features were legal and what legal combinations of features *meant*. I corresponded with some people who had built markdown parsers, and the answer was the same each time: they had reversed engineered some other parser (typically a Perl one) and bashed on it until they were bug-compatible. If I want to get a particular effect in LaTeX or even in HTML+CSS, I can usually figure it out *without* having to run any program. If I want to get a particular effect in Markdown, I flounder around and end up doing without. I am sick of "documentation" that vaguely hints at things, and I am especially sick of Markdown so-called documentation. To say it one more time: I was unable to use the official Markdown documentation, http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax, to guide the construction of a parser. For example, <br> is a valid URL enclosed in <. . .>, so is it a link, as the "Automatic Links" section would suggest, or is it embedded HTML, as the "Inline HTML" section would suggest? Can you tell *from the documentation*? For another example, is *foo**bar**ugh* supposed to map to <em>foo<strong>bar</strong>ugh</em> or to <em>foo</em><em>bar</em><em>ugh</em>? Again, I'm not asking "what does this or that *program* do", I'm asking "can you tell from the documentation what they *ought* to do?" If there is an unambiguous specification of Markdown somewhere (specification; not program), I would be glad to see it. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe