On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Platonides <platoni...@gmail.com> wrote: > Getting a formal definition of ~90% of the wikitext syntax is easy. The > other 10% drived nuts everyone trying to do it hard enough, so far.
I wouldn't put it quite like that. Yes, the problem gets harder as you get nearer the end - but it also doesn't matter, because you're dealing with rare examples. There are also parts of the language best not dealt with this way. For example, there's not much point attempting to parse template transclusions like this, because there will always have to be a pre-processor that handles them. What actually really drove me mad was ANTLR - it wasn't stable, and the effort in turning a language file into a working Java program that I could play with was a lot greater than I expected. And I discovered the usual problem with declarative languages - that small changes in one place can have huge impacts in others. I would definitely like to take up the challenge again sometime. I've sort of been waiting for ANTLR to become more stable. And we'd need some kind of plan of what to do with the language spec file, like whether to actually build a parser off it or whatever. Steve _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
