[antlr-interest] Is ANTLR suitable for wiki grammar parsing?

[Randall R Schulz]

On Wednesday 06 June 2007 15:15, Wincent Colaiuta wrote:
> ...
>
> So what's the alternative? MediaWiki, for example, uses a very
> complicated set of hand-coded regular expressions. It works pretty
> well, but it does have its bugs and it's difficult to maintain. I'm
> hoping that the answer is not "hand-coded regular expressions"...

"Real programmers are not afraid of regular expressions."

"Without regular expressions, programming itself would be impossible."

And so on...


Truly, I don't know, but REs are surely better than some hand-written 
character-level analyzer, right?

Perhaps the answer is "mu." That is, the question is the wrong one. 
Maybe trying to give users a half free-form, half markup language input 
format is just the wrong way to go. Give them either a real 
word-processing-style GUI or a nice rigorous mark-up language. Or, 
given how many people understand a little HTML (at least enough for 
italic, bold and the kind of things the OP mentioned), perhaps 
recognizing a very restricted set of HTML tags would not be a bad idea.


> Cheers,
> Wincent


Randall Schulz