Simetrical wrote:
On 2/11/07, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Rob Church wrote:
Probably, if anybody ever wants this kind of functionality done, we need to direct them to start helping us defining the parser behaviour.
Well I've been advocating that since the second I heard of such projects. If they start doing it, let me know. ;)
I think a lot of people have *started* doing it. It's *finishing* that's the tricky bit. :P
As one of the many people who's done so, I agree. :) The problem is that ~80% of wikimarkup is pretty straightforward to parse using standard methods, another 10-15% can be done without huge difficulty using known-but-less-standard methods, and the remaining 5% doesn't fit well at all into any of the normal models of lexing/parsing. And I'm not even talking about the mess with template substitution, which is a whole different can of worms. Relatively recent improvements in tool infrastructure, like Bison adding GLR parsing, help somewhat, but the last few percent is still a tough nut to crack. It's annoying and tricky enough work that I think it will only get done if: 1) someone is paid to do it; or 2) someone can find a way to work it into a school project.
-Mark