Delirium wrote:
Andrew Rodland wrote:
I had guessed that it might find some use in fr
-- It's too bad to
hear that it's "widely" used. However, I should note that it's not
_required_. <nowiki> resolves the ambiguity nicely. The fact that
it takes 17 characters is, well, unfortunate, but it's _correct_.
The workaround, on the other hand, does bad things to the language,
and makes the implementation of a more advanced parser exceedingly
difficult.
I'm not sure if it would be a more or less drastic change, but making
bold be four tics instead of three would also solve the problem.
That would solve the problem only if we can somehow automatically
convert all existing articles that use triple-apostrophes to mean
"bold". That's not worth it.
My suggestion would instead be to use ""..."" to mean
"bold". This would
not interfere with ''...'' at all. We could have both
'''...''' and
""..."" for the transition period, and once all use of
'''...''' has
been removed (which would be a long long time), the syntax can be
deprecated. This, too, I don't think would be worth it, but on the other
hand, I just ''know'' that someone is going to write a script to do the
conversion automatically.
Then without lookahead: 2 tics is italics; 3 ticks is
an apostrophe
plus italics; 4 tics is bold; 5 tics is an apostrophe plus bold; 6
tics is bold and italic; and 7 tics is an apostrophe plus bold and
italic.
How do you know that 5 tics isn't a single apostrophe wrapped in italics? :)