On Fri, 8 Jul 2011, Arlen Beiler wrote:

For your information, TiddlyWiki has no concept of paragraphs, as you may
have noticed, it simply adds a line break each time you hit enter, which is
why I suggested closing tags at line breaks if they aren't closed. Maybe you
meant the same thing, but I thought I would point it out.

I personally think this is a serious bug (the lack of paragraphs). If
there is discussion going on about clarifying and correcting the
syntax my number one request would be:

* identify blocks, as things which are separated by \n\n, make \n be
  meaningless whitespace

This would imply:

* if somebody wants a br, it needs to be explicit, not implied
* inline tags/markup don't extend beyond the current block

[joe said:]
I have a feeling that the use of regular expressions greatly hinders
writing a parser - regexps are not good at operator precidence, nor
for matching context sensitive grammars and most wiki parsers seem to
be massive sets of regexps which I just cannot read - top-down
recursive descent parsing seems a lot easier.

Yes, this is the way of the wiki world, unfortunately. On hacker news
not long ago there was some talk about how complex the parser for
mediawiki text is[1]. I've tried to write parsers (with formal
grammars) for usemod/purplewiki, kwiki, socialtext and started
thinking about it for tiddlywiki and have never made good progress,
usually because the regexps don't model a formal grammar, so the
exceptional cases are a pain.

If making a correct syntax is the goal, and backwards compatibility is
not a concern, it would probably make sense to start from a grammar and
then implement a tokenizer and one or more generators.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2521576

--
Chris Dent                                   http://burningchrome.com/
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