On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 08:05:14PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
On 09/11/2007, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Jay Ashworth wrote:
The fundamental recurring argument seems to me to be "we can't do that; we'll break too much stuff."
The last time this came up (or maybe it was five or ten times ago; I can't keep track) I think I remember Brion stating pretty emphatically that no change to the parser could be contemplated if it broke *any* stuff. And on one level I think I agree: a cavalier change, that might break stuff and take some time to clean up after, is a very different prospect on a project with 100 pages, or even 10,000 pages, than it is on one with 2,000,000 pages.
So, where are we now?
- Document weird-arse constructs
- Test against odd cases
- See what would make our lives WAY easier to remove
- See how often said annoying bit is actually used, i.e. if it's important
- If not too much, is it fixable?
- goto 1
I believe that's where we are, yes.
Installed base, for our purposes, is two things:
1) pages in the databases.
2) 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.
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 we changed that from '''''this''' wouldn't be any harder'', that people would *cheer*, and not grumble.
(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.)
Cheers, -- jra