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.