Re:Show HN: Fast and Extensible Parser for Markdown in PHP
by greghendershott on Thursday May 22, 2014 @11:43AM
(#7784388)
Well, the original markdown.pl heavily uses regexps.
From having tilted at this windmill a little myself, I think:
1. It's tricky enough to handle correctly all the under-specified corner cases of basic markdown -- not to mention the popular extensions to it. The cognitive load of doing it with complex regexps gets heavy, quickly.
2. I'm incredibly impressed with all the work that John MacFarlane has put into the problem, for example in [Pandoc] and [Cheapskate].
From having tilted at this windmill a little myself, I think:
1. It's tricky enough to handle correctly all the under-specified corner cases of basic markdown -- not to mention the popular extensions to it. The cognitive load of doing it with complex regexps gets heavy, quickly.
2. I'm incredibly impressed with all the work that John MacFarlane has put into the problem, for example in [Pandoc] and [Cheapskate].
[Pandoc]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc
[Cheapskate]: https://github.com/jgm/cheapskate