Andrew Rodland wrote:
Exactly. Now add to that the complication that ''' supposedly means
something completely different from _both_ of those when it's not in
the middle of a word, and that (as with much of the syntax) there has
never been any well-defined rule governing this behavior,
Just because you don't understand the rule doesn't mean it's not
well-defined. It's perfectly well-defined: If there is another ''' in
the same line, it means bold. If there isn't, but there's a '', it means
apostrophe-plus-italics. If neither, it means three apostrophes. Normal
editors don't have to know about or understand this rule in detail as
long as the behaviour is what they expect, which apparently on the
French Wikipedia it is.
only a last-resort hack in PHP code. It's not
simple conceptually,
I think you're expecting a simple solution to a complex problem.
and it's far from simple for the computer, and
it's bad for parsing.
It's perfectly easy for the computer, just as long as it's programmed
right. I have demonstrated this both in the current MediaWiki parser and
in flexbisonparse by replicating the same behaviour without trouble.
Timwi