On 14/11/2007, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Is it ok if I change the goal of the EBNF project from:
- To produce a grammar that precisely matches the parser as it currently
behaves.
to
- To produce a grammar that is indistinguishable from the current parser
as it is normally used.
In other words: let's record the syntax as it exists in people's minds (and their existing work), rather than the behavior of the actual parser.
This is a good idea.
On the point of breaking pages, by the way, I do think that people exaggerate the effects of a grammar change. If, for instance, "[[sdfo|sdf|sf]]" became invalid, or "hello<gallery>sdf</gallery>goodbye" became invalid (block level within inline), this would only affect a fraction of pages.
More to the point, even if every single page on the wiki was affected by a grammar change, that totals at most 2 million edits to fix every page. And that's not much. We have more than 2 million users, nearly every page is being watched by several people -- the bugs would be ironed out actually very quickly.