2010/12/2 Paul Houle paul@ontology2.com
Of all the code I've seen, the Mediawiki code seems to be one ofthe most difficult code bases to make simple changes in.
I'm absolutely not a programmer (probably my profile is much more similar to someone "who should never be allowed anywhere near a computer") but sometimes I write some code to parse wiki markup.
:-(
I came to conclusion that most troubles come out from the fact that wiki markup is intrisecally "badly formed", just the opposite of a "well formed" code. The price of some tricks to build a "user-friendly" language (think only to the use of apostrophes to obtain italic and bold) is extremely high in terms of parsing complexity... another mess comes from mixing contents and attributes inside templates. But I have no hope that this can be fixed.
Alex