[Foundation-l] EBNF of Wikitext

Mon Jan 22 20:31:44 UTC 2007

"Virgil Ierubino" <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com>
wrote in message
news:24dce9db0701211957k752c1b69oec2d75ffbb4e5a68 at mail.gmail.com...
> 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.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitext_Metasyntax

I missed the beginning of this thread for some reason.

Please also see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec and its sub-pages
for some work that has already been done in this area.  It would be useful
if you could merge your new page on meta into this existing content.

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)