[Foundation-l] EBNF of Wikitext

[Magnus Manske]

On 1/22/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/22/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Personally, I'm intrigued. Virgil, could you elaborate on the purpose
> > of this project? In what ways can it help us (and who exactly is the
> > 'us' in this case :))?
>
> As explained already, an EBNF of Wikitext will allow for expansion of
> Wikitext easily as it's conforming to a standard, and a more efficient
> parser, etc. I'm not the expert in WHY it's good though, I just know it is.
> And I know how to write EBNFs, and I can't work out how to code Wikitext's
> bullet points in EBNF - if EBNF can't handle Wikitext, then the efficient
> parsing and expansion won't be possible (as easily).
>
> Would very much appreciate help from anyone clued up as to how to proceed if
> Wikitext can't be EBNFed, or who can show me that it, in fact, can.

It's been tried long before - see the "flexbisonparse" directory in
the MediaWiki SVN. It was half-way but got stuck on nested HTML tags,
IIRC.

Magnus