Why is stdio ... stdio?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, November 10, 2018 7:51:36 PM MST Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-
d-learn wrote:
> On Saturday, 10 November 2018 at 23:29:12 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > The fact that they got added to ddoc just further degrades it
> > as a proper, macro-based markup language.
>
> The backticks were added to ddoc because they enabled something
> that was *virtually impossible* in ddoc before - proper character
> escaping. It actually originally had nothing to do with syntax
> sugar nor even with presentation - just the constant repetition
> of that myth has made it into a bit of reality.

It may be that a feature was needed to do better character escaping, but
backticks really don't fit in with ddoc as a whole, and they've only
encouraged folks to try and add further markdown features to ddoc, which
IMHO, is incredibly negative. On the whole, the worst features of ddoc are
the ones that act least like macros. They're the ones that are most
"magical" and the ones that generally have to be fought and worked around.
Adding more markdown features just makes things worse. As such, I very much
wish that we'd found a different way to fix the character escaping problem.

Regardless, none of that has anything to do with what we do with syntax
highlighting in the newsgroup's web interface.

> On the forum though, characters are already escaped properly, so
> there's no need here. Syntax highlighting for larger blocks is
> something I'm meh on - I don't really care either way if we
> wanted to do it.

I don't really care what the web interface tries to highlight, but I don't
want it doing anything that encourages people to start putting markdown in
their messages, because I don't use the web interface, I don't want to have
to see markdown in the middle of plain text messages any more than I want to
see html.

- Jonathan M Davis