On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 09:03:06PM +0100, David Gerard wrote:
MediaWiki's is, I understand, provably impossible to put in EBNF, which is why the parser documentation is the parser code ... But it's not actually worse than any of the others. Though possibly it has more odd bits bolted on the side.
Well, yeah... but if you order the semantic bits in MWtext, and arrange them in, say, order of popularity...
I wonder how far up the tree you can climb before everything falls apart? :-)
The real substance of my question, though, was "what was the underlying justification behind creating a "new all-singing, all-dancing wikitext syntax a) at this late date, b) which is not a proper subset, at least, of the wikitext syntax in broadest use?" -- either by number of pages, or, I would venture to speculate, number of installations.
Cheers, -- jra