A grant proposal for a new markup language

[Ron Savage]

Another headsup: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/09/grant-proposal-pegex-grammar-f.html

[Ron Savage]

Actually, I think I meant: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/09/grant-proposal-swim-to-pod.html

On Tuesday, 16 September 2014 07:59:15 UTC+10, Ron Savage wrote:

Another headsup: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/09/grant-proposal-pegex-grammar-f.html

[Michael Roberts]

Now that's interesting! I hate POD - Ingy's problems with it are exactly right as far as I'm concerned. I love its ubiquity, of course, and the integration with CPAN and friends, but as a markup it sucks.

[Ron Savage]

Actually, it's the integration of POD with code which will make it hard to replace, unlike developing something (Markdown, anyone?) to run in parallel, which is much easier, and which has been done many times already.

[Andrew Kirkpatrick]

I'm a fan of Emacs' org-mode, which can do pretty much what Swim does
and more, but it's tied to a thermonuclear text editor and decoupling
them removes half the features. I foresee an org exporter to swim.

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[Ron Savage]

One of the comments to the swim proposal pointed to http://commonmark.org/. I've just added it to the list of parser proposals: http://savage.net.au/Perl-modules/html/marpa.papers/chapter5.html.

We can joke: That's the good thing about standards, there are so many to choose from. (Nods wisely). And don't get me started on date formats, especially in protocol documents.

But a rock-solid parser would make Markdown even more popular. And be a booster for Marpa.

[Andrew Kirkpatrick]

I had a look at the forum for commonmark, and it seems that it has a
ways to go - the spec currently suffers from similar ambiguity that it
set out to fix and there is no explicit grammar to be found. I hope
they get there though, and proceed to include the sensible markdown
extensions that are around.

[Ron Savage]

Yes, this is a problem, but they've definitely got the right idea trying to pin down the grammar.

Presumably the lack of a BNF-format grammar reflects their lack of understanding that Marpa can help.

Did you submit feedback? If not, let us know and I'll at least ask them to consider BNF (to save any of us the effort :-).

Also if not, please list some ambiguities here I can pass on.

[Andrew Kirkpatrick]

Hi Ron,

I haven't submitted any feedback to them and I'm not up on the detail
of the ambiguities, I was just reflecting on the content of this
thread on their forum:

http://talk.commonmark.org/t/commonmark-formal-grammar/46

Cheers

[Ron Savage]

OK Andrew. Thanx for the feedback.

I've just asked if any one there has considered Marpa. I strongly suspect not. We'll see.

[Ron Savage]

So far the only response is to say a JS implementation would be even better (than the C one, they mean).