Andrew Rodland wrote:
Exactly. Now add to that the complication that ''' supposedly means something completely different from _both_ of those when it's not in the middle of a word, and that (as with much of the syntax) there has never been any well-defined rule governing this behavior,
Just because you don't understand the rule doesn't mean it's not well-defined. It's perfectly well-defined: If there is another ''' in the same line, it means bold. If there isn't, but there's a '', it means apostrophe-plus-italics. If neither, it means three apostrophes. Normal editors don't have to know about or understand this rule in detail as long as the behaviour is what they expect, which apparently on the French Wikipedia it is.
only a last-resort hack in PHP code. It's not simple conceptually,
I think you're expecting a simple solution to a complex problem.
and it's far from simple for the computer, and it's bad for parsing.
It's perfectly easy for the computer, just as long as it's programmed right. I have demonstrated this both in the current MediaWiki parser and in flexbisonparse by replicating the same behaviour without trouble.
Timwi