On 11/10/07, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
- rules in people's heads.
The first is easy to fix, you just grind.
The second... well, I submit for your approval that in corner cases, users are either looking them up, or praying and trying again *anyway*, so you don't break anything by changing them.
No one knows how ''''foo''' renders, so no one is put out by us changing it.
No one knows how ;#foo:blaa renders, so no one is put out by us changing it.
Etc.
That is, I suspect that //**this** wouldn't be any harder// for people
to write, and in fact, quite a bit easier, and it would be *much* easier to parse. In point of fact, I suspect that on point 2 above, if
That is ridiculously readable. I know it's just an arbitrary example, but it's extremely easy to know exactly what you meant. Which sick individual ever came up with '''''this''' crazy'' syntax anyway?
we changed that from '''''this''' wouldn't be any harder'', that people
would *cheer*, and not grumble.
*Steve cheers*.
(I, personally, think that *bold*, /italics/ and _underline_ would
parse just fine, and that they wouldn't be nearly as difficult to disambig as people assert, but I've never tried to write a parser.)
We don't really need underline. And I don't agree: people use * and / all the time in normal text, whereas ** and // are almost unheard of. Yes, if people are going to quote C comments, they'll have to escape it, but that's basically the case now anyway with an empty string in Pascal etc. Let's not be biased towards quoting source code. And let's minimise the amount of escaping needed.
Steve