2009/9/25 Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com:
The point is that wikitext doesn't *have* parsing errors. The parser is very tolerant in that it tries to resolve 'invalid' and ambiguous constructs by some combination of guessing what was probably intended and trying not to mess up the rest of the article (the newline thing mentioned earlier fall in the latter category). I agree that this probably causes the weird quirks that make wikitext such a horribly complex language to define and parse, so I think a good way to continue this discussion would be to talk about how invalid, ambiguous and otherwise unexpected input should be handled.
In past discussions I have noted that "tag soup" is a *feature* of human languages, not a bug.
HTML was constructed as a computer markup language for humans. Unfortunately, the humans in question were nuclear physicists; lesser beings couldn't handle it.
Note how HTML5 now defines how to handle "bad" syntax, in recognition of the fact that humans write tag soup.
Wikitext spitting errors would be a bug in wikitext, not a feature.
- d.