[actually the subject was "A Modest Proposal on grammar and parsers" but I wanted to merge it with the other thread] On 11/14/07, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:

While that likely would mean changing some corner-case behavior (as noted above, the existing parser doesn't always do what's desired), it would not be a different *syntax* from the human perspective.

This is a very fine, but very important line you're drawing.

I had been assuming that not supporting the "some ''text[[foo|blah ''blah]]" case would count as changing the "syntax".

But that syntax is not salient, it is not important, it is arguably broken, and changing it is not "from the human perspective" necessarily even a change.

Similarly, you can embed <gallery> tags in the middle of a sentence. Is this desirable? Is this a mistake? Does this form part of the actual "syntax" we want to support?

Is it ok if I change the goal of the EBNF project from:

1) To produce a grammar that precisely matches the parser as it currently behaves.

to

2) 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.

Steve