On 1/22/07, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I'm intrigued. Virgil, could you elaborate on the purpose of this project? In what ways can it help us (and who exactly is the 'us' in this case :))?
As explained already, an EBNF of Wikitext will allow for expansion of Wikitext easily as it's conforming to a standard, and a more efficient parser, etc. I'm not the expert in WHY it's good though, I just know it is. And I know how to write EBNFs, and I can't work out how to code Wikitext's bullet points in EBNF - if EBNF can't handle Wikitext, then the efficient parsing and expansion won't be possible (as easily).
Would very much appreciate help from anyone clued up as to how to proceed if Wikitext can't be EBNFed, or who can show me that it, in fact, can.
On 1/22/07, Virgil Ierubino virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/22/07, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I'm intrigued. Virgil, could you elaborate on the purpose of this project? In what ways can it help us (and who exactly is the 'us' in this case :))?
As explained already, an EBNF of Wikitext will allow for expansion of Wikitext easily as it's conforming to a standard, and a more efficient parser, etc. I'm not the expert in WHY it's good though, I just know it is. And I know how to write EBNFs, and I can't work out how to code Wikitext's bullet points in EBNF - if EBNF can't handle Wikitext, then the efficient parsing and expansion won't be possible (as easily).
Would very much appreciate help from anyone clued up as to how to proceed if Wikitext can't be EBNFed, or who can show me that it, in fact, can.
It's been tried long before - see the "flexbisonparse" directory in the MediaWiki SVN. It was half-way but got stuck on nested HTML tags, IIRC.
Magnus
I'd be concerned how to implement ''''' without a reduce/reduce conflict. That said, this is probably getting too technical for foundation-l.
Magnus Manske wrote:
It's been tried long before - see the "flexbisonparse" directory in the MediaWiki SVN. It was half-way but got stuck on nested HTML tags, IIRC.
"Virgil Ierubino" virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote in message news:24dce9db0701211957k752c1b69oec2d75ffbb4e5a68@mail.gmail.com...
On 1/22/07, Gerard Meijssen
gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I'm intrigued. Virgil, could you elaborate on the purpose of this project? In what ways can it help us (and who exactly is the 'us' in this case :))?
As explained already, an EBNF of Wikitext will allow for expansion of Wikitext easily as it's conforming to a standard, and a more efficient parser, etc. I'm not the expert in WHY it's good though, I just know it
is.
And I know how to write EBNFs, and I can't work out how to code Wikitext's bullet points in EBNF - if EBNF can't handle Wikitext, then the efficient parsing and expansion won't be possible (as easily).
Would very much appreciate help from anyone clued up as to how to proceed
if
Wikitext can't be EBNFed, or who can show me that it, in fact, can.
I missed the beginning of this thread for some reason.
Please also see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec and its sub-pages for some work that has already been done in this area. It would be useful if you could merge your new page on meta into this existing content.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)
On Mon, 22 Jan 2007 20:31:44 +0000, Mark Clements wrote:
"Virgil Ierubino" virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote in message news:24dce9db0701211957k752c1b69oec2d75ffbb4e5a68@mail.gmail.com...
On 1/22/07, Gerard Meijssen
gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I'm intrigued. Virgil, could you elaborate on the purpose of this project? In what ways can it help us (and who exactly is the 'us' in this case :))?
As explained already, an EBNF of Wikitext will allow for expansion of Wikitext easily as it's conforming to a standard, and a more efficient parser, etc. I'm not the expert in WHY it's good though, I just know it
is.
And I know how to write EBNFs, and I can't work out how to code Wikitext's bullet points in EBNF - if EBNF can't handle Wikitext, then the efficient parsing and expansion won't be possible (as easily).
Would very much appreciate help from anyone clued up as to how to proceed
if
Wikitext can't be EBNFed, or who can show me that it, in fact, can.
I missed the beginning of this thread for some reason.
Please also see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec and its sub-pages for some work that has already been done in this area. It would be useful if you could merge your new page on meta into this existing content.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)
To try and answer some of what was said before;
No, I don't think wiki text can be fully EBNFed. Basically, an EBNF is a formal specification for a well defined grammar. The idea is that the grammar is defined by the specification, and parsers can be written for it.
Currently, wiki follows the perl model; *the* parser defines the grammar, and any ambiguities are resolved by seeing how the parser deals with them.
The way to proceed would be to first specify (EBNF) the unambiguous parts that can be easily specified, then tweak the parser so that the grammar would match the specification.
The advantage of doing this is that the grammar is then tied to a formal specification, instead of a parser implementation, so different implementations could parse the exact same grammar. (i.e. currently, if you had parsers in php, perl, & C, they would handle a few corner cases based on peculiarities of the language, so they would technically implement 3 slightly different grammars, which would hopefully be close enough).
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