On 11/28/07, Jared Williams <jared.williams1(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Right. I'm building an AST as well. I didn't say, "Let's change the semantics of apostrophes because I can't parse them", I'm saying "Let's change the semantics of apostrophes because they don't work well and because they're hard to parse." In general, the easier the grammar is to parse, *without* having to build a tree and then manipulate it, the better. But the real argument here is that the bold->italics conversion works very badly, and could be improved. Would my suggested change have any downsides? Steve

On 11/29/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Um. I guess there is whitespace, there are letters, then there is a lot of grey area which is neither whitespace nor letters.. Since we're really targeting these particular language expressions, I think it makes sense to restrict this behaviour to *letters* rather than *non-whitespace*. Also, I only suggested changing the behaviour in the middle of a word, rather than at the end, which you rule out in your definition. That is, this''' would be bold in my definition, but not yours. So, the definition I would go with: Bold can be toggled anywhere except between two letters. Where "letters" is suitably broad to cover all letters, accented or otherwise, in all languages that are likely to want to use this construct. (This could need refining, but we'd need input from actual users of these languages. Is a French speaker likely to want to write l'''11'' for instance? Perhaps.) Steve