Brian Skinn <bsk...@alum.mit.edu> added the comment:

Mm, agreed--that regex wouldn't be hard to write.

The problem is, AFAICT there's irresolvable syntactic ambiguity in a line 
starting with exactly three periods, if the doctest PS2 specification is not 
constrained to be exactly "... ". In such a case, "..." could mark either (1) 
an ellipsis standing in for an entire line of 'want', or (2) a PS2, marking a 
blank line in 'source'.

I don't really think aggressive lookahead would help much -- an arbitrary 
number of following lines could contain exactly "...", and the intended 
transition from 'source' to 'want' could lie at any one of them.  The 
nonrecursive nature of regex is unhelpful here, but I don't think one could 
even write a recursive-descent parser, or similar, that could be 100% reliable 
on a single comparison. It would have to test the string against all the 
various splits between 'source' and 'want' along those "..." lines, and see if 
any match. Hairy mess.

AFAICT, defining "... " as PS2, and "..." as 'ellipsis representing a whole 
line' is the cleanest solution from a logical point of view.

Of course, then it's *visually* confusing, because trailing space. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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