On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 06:53:13PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
This thread has gotten so dense that I can no longer discern what the topic is, much less who's on which side. If anyone sees fit to continue it, I suggest they start by enumerating those two things.
Not sure what you mean by 'dense'. My "side" of the thread is just that I get agitated at illogical/fallacious arguments like "let's not use slashes for italics -- they look like regular expressions." That's all.
I don't believe it's a fallacious arguemnt. Let me cast it for you slightly differently:
Choices for inline text markup coding should be made so as to collide with the least possible number of already extant uses of that set of punctuation.
That's why [[ ]], '' '', and ''' ''' are pretty good choices, while the leading space for indention, slightly less so.
While *bold* would be contextual, since <BOL>* is already in use for list items, _italics_ would not, and doesn't collide with anything.
/italics/, though, would, probably unexpectedly, collide with the writing of Regexes, and there's no good way to disambiguate from context (as there is with *bold face marking*).
Cheers, -- jra