On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 4:05 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Brian wrote:
This round the Usability Initiative got 800,000 dollars. That's a load of money. If the Foundation decides that it wants to fix the problem the correct way then it can. And it can start at any time! We just need to
agree
on a solution.
We can't fix the problem by looking backwards at the wikitext that has already been produced along with the language definition (5,000 lines of parser code) and saying that the problem is simply intractable. In fact,
the
problem does not depend in any way on the quantity of wikitext that has
been
produced - it only depends on an understanding (if not a definition) of
the
language as it currently exists. Hard work but not, at all, impossible.
...
- wikitext parsing would be much faster if the language was well defined
and
we could use flex/bison/etc...
Have you read the archives? It has been tried. Several times. There's even a mailing list for that.
Getting a formal definition of ~90% of the wikitext syntax is easy. The other 10% drived nuts everyone trying to do it hard enough, so far.
Keep trying, but build over what's already done.
Platonides, if you had read the archives you would know that I am very familiar with previous work done on creating formal grammars for wikitext, and that I know it would take a redesign of certain parts of the language. Of course, this information is embedded in the very text you quote.