"Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com wrote in message news:b8ceeef70711071509q14ef0fbdx123cae126940b271@mail.gmail.com...
What's the status of the project to create a grammar for Wikitext in EBNF?
There are two pages: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitext_Metasyntax http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec
Nothing seems to have happened since January this year. Also the comments
on
the latter page seem to indicate a lack of clear goal: is this just a fun project, is it to improve the existing parser, or is it to facilititate a new parser? It's obviously a lot of work, so it needs to be of clear benefit. Brion requested the grammar IIRC (and there's a comment to that effect at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7 ), so I'm wondering what became of it.
Is there still a goal of replacing the parser? Or is there some
alternative
plan?
The plan is normally to document the parser so it is properly defined.
This is normally abandoned when it is realised that this is 'very hard' (impossible in BNF/EBNF form according to some people).
Hence several attempts with no current activity.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)