[Haskell-cafe] how to get started: a text application

[Bayley, Alistair]

> From: Max Ischenko [mailto:max at ucmg.com.ua] 
> 
> Well, yes. In Markdown, like in most other "rich-text" 
> formats symbols are overloaded a lot. After all, it has to 
> constrain itself to "plain text".
> 
> I'm going to try a "two-stage tokenization" (not sure how to 
> name this correctly). Basically, first I'd split the raw text 
> into "symbols" (like space, char, digit, left-bracket) and 
> then turn these symbols into tokens (like paragraph, 
> reference, start bold text, end bold text, etc.)


Markdown looks a lot like Wiki source to me i.e. it looks like the text
source for a Wiki page. It seems to serve the same purpose i.e.
well-formatted plain text intended for conversion to HTML.

Many (most?) Wiki engines use straightforward regex substitution to convert
the text source into HTML, rather than implement a
lexer/parser/pretty-printer combination. Obviously this makes for a fairly
simple implementation. Mind you, some of the regex's are quite complex...

See, for example:

  Source for Moin-moin, which runs the Haskell wiki:
  http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/moin/MoinMoin/parser/wiki.py?view=markup

  Original c2.com wiki (actual source a bit hard to find):
  http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TextFormattingRegularExpressions

  ... which leads to:
  http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TextFormattingRegularExpressionsDiscussion
  http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlternativesToRegularExpressions

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