forking Markdown.pl?

[Tomas Doran]

Sorry for the delay in responding, the weekend happened - and it  
mostly involved moving my brother in law house rather than reading  
email...

On 29 Feb 2008, at 16:04, david parsons wrote:


> In article <931A108A-0D2B-4B82-A5CA-81DE3C414494 at bobtfish.net>,

> Tomas Doran  <markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net> wrote:

>> Text::Markdown *does not* extend the original Markdown syntax *in any

>> way*.

>

>     Yes.   you said "and Text::MultiMarkdown" which provoked

>     my comments.  I'm sorry -- I  misunderstood you.


No worries :)

They're actually using the same codebase, and currently  
Text::Markdown is a reasonably nasty hack to switch all the  
MultiMarkdown additions off...

In the longer term, I'm trying to find a more parser-like way of  
doing things, so that each module becomes just a composition of a  
number of 'features'. You can then trivially extend (or even build  
your own variant of a makrdown-like language) by compositing the  
features differently to one of the default dialects..

But a complete parser re-write is a long way off (as I don't have  
that much time), but whilst I'm slowly getting there - it'd be great  
to have a spec / test suite evolve from the community that was solid  
enough that I had confidence that the rebuilt parser was going to "do  
the right thing" in the same way as both the original and other  
implementations..


>     What I'd love, too, is to see is to have the spec nailed down and

>     blessed by John Gruber, at the very least so people don't have to

>     trawl through markdown.discuss and 30 or so individual

>     implementations to figure what the state of the art is.   It's

>     somewhat less ego-ridden than replacing the reference spec.


Spec and test suite, but yes, totally.

As I've already stated, I'll be jumping on any bandwagons that emerge  
from this discussion, as will a number of the other people on the  
list who are maintaining markdown implementations, so I'm extremely  
pleased, as 'the community' seems to actually be moving forward in a  
really positive way. :)

Cheers
Tom