Backtick Hickup

[Michael Sheets]

On Aug 20, 2007, at 10:17 AM, John MacFarlane wrote:


> If the suggestion is that the lexer is going to identify '**' as

> a "strong emphasis marker" and '*' as an "emphasis marker," prior

> to any parsing, I don't see how that's possible. Consider

>

>     ***bold** in italics*

>

>     ***italics* in bold**

>

> There's no way of knowing whether the initial two *'s should start

> strong emphasis unless you scan forward.

>

> Btw, I notice that the TextMate syntax highlighter gets these cases

> wrong. Markdown.pl gets them wrong too, turning the first into

>

>     <p><strong><em>bold</strong> in italics</em></p>

>

> pandoc gets them right:


I think your just proving the case here not helping it. The markdown  
page is very vague in this regard not even mentioning that ***bold  
italics*** works. It says that asterisks surrounded by whitespace are  
literal. Technically the following should work according to the page:

foo** bold **foo

What makes the Markdown.pl interpretation wrong? (Ignoring for the  
moment it's improperly nested html.) Without a proper syntax you  
can't say that either one is right or wrong, only that one is  
preferable in your opinion.