On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 05:29:11PM +1100, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 11/10/07, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
- rules in people's heads.
The first is easy to fix, you just grind.
The second... well, I submit for your approval that in corner cases, users are either looking them up, or praying and trying again *anyway*, so you don't break anything by changing them.
No one knows how ''''foo''' renders, so no one is put out by us changing it.
I know, just from conversation on this list today: it will render as a boldfaced foo, preceded by an apostrophe.
No one knows how ;#foo:blaa renders, so no one is put out by us changing it.
But your point here is pretty close to the one I was trying to make.
That is, I suspect that //**this** wouldn't be any harder// for people to write, and in fact, quite a bit easier, and it would be *much* easier to parse. In point of fact, I suspect that on point 2 above, if
That is ridiculously readable. I know it's just an arbitrary example, but it's extremely easy to know exactly what you meant. Which sick individual ever came up with '''''this''' crazy'' syntax anyway?
Someone whose legacy I wish to demolish, yes.
we changed that from '''''this''' wouldn't be any harder'', that people would *cheer*, and not grumble.
*Steve cheers*.
You were grumbling two messages ago.... :-)
(I, personally, think that *bold*, /italics/ and _underline_ would parse just fine, and that they wouldn't be nearly as difficult to disambig as people assert, but I've never tried to write a parser.)
We don't really need underline. And I don't agree: people use * and / all the time in normal text, whereas ** and // are almost unheard of. Yes, if people are going to quote C comments, they'll have to escape it, but that's basically the case now anyway with an empty string in Pascal etc. Let's not be biased towards quoting source code. And let's minimise the amount of escaping needed.
Conceded. And, of course __this__ is already in use, anyway.
Cheers, -- jra