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_.
Of *course* it's required. By saying it isn't, you're thinking too technically. Humans aren't like that, humans just want to write their text and not ugly tags and syntax elements just for a single apostrophe.
<nowiki> resolves the ambiguity nicely.
Again -- "nicely" only in the technical sense, but not in the human usability sense.
The workaround, on the other hand, does bad things to the language, and makes the implementation of a more advanced parser exceedingly difficult.
You are making two assumptions here that are both false.
Firstly, you are assuming that the language becomes more ambiguous this way. This is false, because by handling this case explicitly, I have actually made it *less* ambiguous. Previously, it was only a side-effect of the way regular expressions match text that three apostrophes were rendered as <i> followed by an apostrophe. Now I have specifically written code to define three apostrophes to mean "an apostrophe followed by open-italics, unless there is another triple-apostrophe in the line, in which case it's open-bold". No ambiguity there.
The second assumption you are making (explicitly, even) is that it is more difficult to implement, when in fact you really just mean that you found it harder because it is not the way regular expressions normally work (and because you find the behaviour confusing because you don't normally think of French). I didn't find this particularly difficult to do -- neither in the current parser, nor in flexbisonparse.
Greetings, Timwi