Top all-time · #10026
Roopesh Chander
Personal blog · roopc.net · on HN as roopprogrammingweb
Roopesh Chander's personal blog at roopc.net covers programming and web. Since 2013, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 13 times, most often “Why isn't there a formal grammar for Markdown?”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Comments cite this blog's post on why Markdown cannot be written as an unambiguous context-free grammar (BNF), and its evaluation of Standard Markdown. They use it as a reference for the grammar problem.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /posts/2014/markdown-cfg/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-09-05
- Why isn't there a formal grammar for Markdown?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-10-18
- Evaluating the “Common Markdown” / stmd specification2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-09-05
What Hacker News says?
With PEGs, it's not possible to express nested content, so we have to collate for example the blockquoted content of blockquotes and process them separately. Per my understanding (and I might be wrong here), part of the problem is that PEG includes tokenization, so it's not possible to handle blockquote-levels in the tokeniser separately. More details on PEG for Markdown: - from the author of the PEG grammar, who's…
Comment linking /posts/2014/markdown-cfg/
on “Standard Markdown”Submitted Evaluating the “Common Markdown” / stmd specification as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt is not, and not just because of a few idiosyncrasies like C which require context. Fundamentally, markdown was specified as some pattern matching and English description. The original specification was not done thinking of productions and grammar rules, and you typically don't get there by accident. See http://roopc.net/posts/2014/markdown-cfg/ for a detailed exposition of how the '*' character in markdown is suf…
Comment linking /posts/2014/markdown-cfg/
on “A Formal Spec for GitHub Flavored Markdown”Submitted The reason behind Swift Array weirdnesses as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's not possible to write a BNF for Markdown. At least not an unambiguous, useful BNF. http://roopc.net/posts/2014/markdown-cfg/
Comment linking /posts/2014/markdown-cfg/
on “A Formal Spec for GitHub Flavored Markdown”Submitted Looking back at Stephen Elop's "burning-platform" memo as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPandoc can also process reStructuredText [1], which looks similar to Markdown, but has more features and a single non-ambiguous specification. Me and my co-author rejected Markdown for our book about internet memes [2][3] after a short evaluation, mainly due to ambiguities [4] and lack of features. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText [2] The book can be downloaded for free: http://internetmeme.de [3]…
Comment linking /posts/2014/eval-stmd/
on “How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools”Submitted The Symbian Experience as a story · 2 points
HN discussionb/c I think people start from the syntax and then think about how to parse it later? A simple grammar probably really limits how you can design your syntax. Here is an example of the problems: https://roopc.net/posts/2014/markdown-cfg/
Comment linking /posts/2014/markdown-cfg/
on “If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown”Submitted Why isn't there a formal grammar for Markdown? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI don't know of any light-weight markup language that are intentionally designed to be context-free and unambiguous. I wish I did. I'm not sure if any exist, although some people have tried to write grammars for existing markup languages. http://roopc.net/posts/2014/markdown-cfg/ https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoc-grammar-prototype https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6178546/antlr-grammar-fo... https://www.medi…
Comment linking /posts/2014/markdown-cfg/
on “LL and LR in Context: Why Parsing Tools Are Hard (2013)”Submitted IOS 7: Flat, or not? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere is another evaluation of Common/Standard Markdown by the author of vfmd: http://roopc.net/posts/2014/eval-stmd
Comment linking /posts/2014/eval-stmd
on “Why CommonMark Isn't the Solution”
