[Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] Fmark markup language

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 19/09/2012, at 1:43 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

>> The problem with that is that some people DO end some headings with
>> a full stop; for them your special syntax is not natural.
> 
> Markdown/ReST is already using the "no syntax" idea (e.g. compared to
> pre-wiki markup such a LaTeX or Texinfo), so he's simply trying to push
> this idea further.

Markdown is very heavy on syntax,
what it is *light* on is specification of what the
syntax actually is.  As a result,
I'm aware of three different dialects,
and someone told me about having to reverse
engineer the syntax from a Perl implementation.
As a further result, I cannot write a program to
reliably *generate* Markdown.
> 
> I suspect it'll be difficult.

Oh, more power to him for trying.
I just don't think it can be pushed very far.

Oh, there is a really *filthy* hack that could be pulled
for italics, bold face, and so on.  Contrary to its original
principles, Unicode includes several copies of ASCII
(see http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D400.pdf):
Mathematical bold,
Mathematical italic,
Mathematical bold italic,
Mathematical script,
Mathematical bold script,
Mathematical fraktur,
Mathematical double struck (blackboard-bold),
Mathematical bold fraktur,
Mathematical sans-serif,
Mathematical sans-serif bold,
Mathematical sans-serif italic,
Mathematical sans-serif bold italic,
Mathematical monospace,
and some similar sets of Greek.
So as long as you don't want strike-through or underlying,
and as long as you don't want italic Cyrillic &c, ...
Too bad if you want a bold italic capital Thorn...

> 
>> What if I want to use indentation to express quotation instead?
> 
> I think this one is solvable: a paragraph that's more indented than the
> previous heading can be considered a quote.

Ah, but the quotation might not end with a sentence terminator,
so that would be considered a new heading.