Adding Markdown to Ddoc

[Jakob Bornecrantz]

On Monday, 11 December 2017 at 00:54:00 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/10/2017 6:22 AM, meppl wrote:
>> I think these are wrong criterias to estimate the value of 
>> commonmark. Commonmark doesn't need to list anyone and doesn't 
>> need to be listed by anyone to be a standard. commonmark is a 
>> standard proven by following "facts":
>> 1) whenever a language feature is used by all popular markdown 
>> languages, it is standard
>> 2) there are markdown features who are used by all popular 
>> markdown languages
>> 3) everyone can reveal this matter of fact - e.g. by writing 
>> it down as a specification
>> 4) any language feature published by the commonmark-spec is 
>> used by all popular markdown languages
>> ergo: commonmark == standard markdown
>> well, at least, if the commonmark people did their homework 
>> right
>
> I have a more pragmatic definition of a standard:
>
> 1. Products that implement it say they adhere to it and defer 
> to it as the authority on correct behavior.
>
> 2. There's more than one such product.
>
> 3. There's more products adhering to that standard than some 
> other competing standard.
>
> So far as I know, commonmarkdown satisfies zero of those.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I think commonmarkdown is a worthy effort, 
> and is definitely in the running to be a standard. Certainly a 
> lot more effort seems to have been put into it vs other 
> markdowns. It is entirely reasonable to refer to it to answer 
> questions about whether some detail should yin or yang.
>
> But implementing commonmarkdown in Ddoc is not what we're going 
> to do, at least for the near term.

There are loads of implementations of CommonMark 
https://github.com/commonmark/CommonMark/wiki/List-of-CommonMark-Implementations the one I have written is not listed. That covers 1 and 2.

Also Markdown is not a standard, it started out as a pearl script 
and the a short documentation on how to write text for it. It has 
several ambiguities, leading to a lot of implementations do 
things differently. So they don't agree on the authority of 
Markdown. Which makes Markdown a mess because you don't know what 
behaviour you will get from the different implementation. So that 
covers 3.

And to add more, CommonMark on the other hand has a full spec 
written and several test that covers the difficult to get right 
parts of Markdown/CommonMark. I'm sure I don't need to tell you 
the virtues of a good test suit.

Cheers, Jakob.