evolving the spec (was: forking Markdown.pl?)

[david parsons]

In article <EB61C125-47FB-4DC7-ABE2-BBD576D95F8A at attacklab.net>,
John Fraser  <markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net> wrote:

>On Mar 1, 2008, at 1:19 PM, david parsons wrote:

>>> I agree that Markdown needs to be defined unambiguously, but I don't

>>> think that's feasible with plain English in the loop.  For something

>>> as complex and flighty as Markdown, we need working code.

>>

>>    I'm not so sure about this.   I managed to write a markdown

>>    implementation without using anything other than the daring  

>> fireball

>>    syntax document and MarkdownTest_1.0.   And I am by no means a

>>    Perl programmer.

>

>

>Okay, but I'd argue that your success had a lot more to do with the  

>test suite than the syntax document.


    I'm not sure. The test suite kicked out about 7 failures where
    I spazzed out and misread the syntax document, but there was
    only one place where I actually had to hack the compiler to
    generate test-matching code (the first line of a code block
    needs to have trailing whitespace trimmed.)

    If I didn't have a test suite, it would have taken a lot longer to
    dust out the corners, but if I was confronted with nothing but a
    mass of Perl code and a test suite, I don't think I would have
    even bothered.


>I'll admit it: I'm probably more suspicious of paper specs than I  

>should be.  But I can't help thinking that (1) any natural-language  

>Markdown spec will have holes; (2) any test suite will have littler  

>holes; and (3) the most popular implementation will always be the de  

>facto standard.


    Which means that you end up having to code-peek to determine
    how the language works.   And this restricts the audience to
    people who are proficient in that language (or, worse yet, to
    people who are proficient to the particular dialect that the
    developers used when they wrote the code.)

    (And it still needs documentation so people can actually use
    the code;  if Markdown.pl didn't have the syntax document
    or the dingus, I suspect that the userbase would be the two
    people who developed the language in the first place.   So
    if you're going to have a document describing how the language
    works, why not say that document is the definition of the
    language and have it fully describe the process that is
    already being done?)


    -david parsons