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A comment on I Prefer RST to Markdown. Parent comment

Re:I Prefer RST to Markdown by rune-space on Sunday August 17, 2025 @10:43PM (#44936879)
But you can’t say:

   thisis:strong:`bold`text
Whereas the equivalent is perfectly fine in markdown.

Falsehoods programmers believe about written language: whitespace is used to separate atomic sequences of runes.

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Re:I Prefer RST to Markdown by thaumasiotes on Monday August 18, 2025 @02:43AM (#44938020)
> Falsehoods programmers believe about written language: whitespace is used to separate atomic sequences of runes.

Really? That isn't just untrue of written language in general. It's untrue of every individual written language in specific. You can't even clearly define what an "atomic sequence of glyphs" is.

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Re:I Prefer RST to Markdown by matja on Monday August 18, 2025 @05:18AM (#44938749)
> You can't even clearly define what an "atomic sequence of glyphs" is.

Kinda. Grapheme cluster breaks are defined in Unicode, but they have all the baggage and edge-cases you'd expect from human languages evolving over time, so they can be encoded in as a few as a thousand rules : https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/tree/main/icu4c/source/da...

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Re:I Prefer RST to Markdown by rune-space on Monday August 18, 2025 @11:52AM (#44941990)
Which makes one wonder why REST puts so much weight on them being divided by WS!
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