On 11/10/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
2) rules in people's heads.
The first is easy to fix, you just grind.
The second... well, I submit for your approval that in corner cases,
users are either looking them up, or praying and trying again *anyway*,
so you don't break anything by changing them.
No one knows how ''''foo''' renders, so no one is put out by
us changing it.
No one knows how ;#foo:blaa renders, so no one is put out by us changing it.
Etc.
That is, I suspect that //**this** wouldn't be any harder// for people
to write, and in fact, quite a bit easier, and it
would be *much*
easier to parse. In point of fact, I suspect that on point 2 above, if
That is ridiculously readable. I know it's just an arbitrary example,
but it's extremely easy to
know exactly what you meant. Which sick individual ever came up with
'''''this''' crazy'' syntax
anyway?
we changed that from '''''this''' wouldn't be any
harder'', that people
would *cheer*, and not grumble.
*Steve cheers*.
(I, personally, think that *bold*, /italics/ and _underline_ would
parse just fine, and that they wouldn't be nearly
as difficult to
disambig as people assert, but I've never tried to write a parser.)
We don't really need underline. And I don't agree: people use * and / all
the time in
normal text, whereas ** and // are almost unheard of. Yes, if people are
going to
quote C comments, they'll have to escape it, but that's basically the case
now anyway with an empty string in Pascal etc. Let's not be biased towards
quoting
source code. And let's minimise the amount of escaping needed.
Steve