On 11/13/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Bison, or even hand-written recursive descent parsers, are good at parsing correct language, but not very good at reporting syntax errors in a way that is useful for corrections. One difference
I'm curious how this will turn out in practice. As has been pointed out, there aren't really "syntax errors" in Wikitext, just text that renders differentlly from you expected. I can't really visualise what effect switching from a regexp-style parser to a recursive one will make on the appearance of errors. Hopefully not a great one.
I think my main motivation for working on a new and better parser is to give MediaWiki room to grow. It's currently really stifled by the many layers of text replacement that take place, and developers continually express a fear of "breaking the parser". That inhibits the development of new features.
Steve