[Zope-dev] Future of StructuredText

[David Goodger]

Richard Jones wrote:
> [courtesy cc send to David G, so if I make any blatantly errneous statements
> he can come chase me with the Big Stick :)]

Thanks for being a vocal proponent!

> On Wed, 4 Sep 2002 8:01 pm, Max M wrote:
>> Andreas Jung wrote:
>>> I would be fine to have reStructuredText inside the Zope core (for 2.7)
>>> and to deprecate the current StructuredText in the long run.
>> 
>> +1
> 
> +1 but with the reservations below :)
...
> One of the big issues is that rest isn't optimised.

This is true.  Optimization isn't even on the radar at this point, although
I'd be more than happy if someone were to take a look at it.

> The emphasis so far has been to build it to spec.

True.  That's why there *is* a spec, and why the spec preceded the
implementation.  Even after the implementation of the initial feature set,
whenever new features were added the spec was always updated first.  One of
my biggest problems with ST was its spec, or lack thereof.

> It's potentially much slower than stx because the latter has been around for
> longer and therefore is potentially more tweaked.

I'd say ST (classic, anyhow; never grokked the NG code) is faster simply
because it does much less. ;-)

> I believe migration may be possible - that is, the parser half of rest might
> be mutable enough to make it handle stx blocks and other syntax
> eccentricities. That's a question for David Goodger to answer really.

Compatibility with ST was never a consideration; I took the good ideas and
left the rest.  Except for section structure, reStructuredText is mostly a
superset of ST, but there may be some gotchas.

The reStructuredText parser is built generically enough that it could (with
recoding) handle ST as well.  I don't see the need though.

> As I understand it though, there's ambiguities in stx that the rest parser
> might not interpret in the same manner as the stx parser.

There's ST's use of 'o' as bullet list marker, for one.  Footnotes &
footnote references are different, as are hyperlinks in general.  There are
others I'm sure.

-- 
David Goodger  <goodger@users.sourceforge.net>  Open-source projects:
  - Python Docutils: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/
    (includes reStructuredText: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html)
  - The Go Tools Project: http://gotools.sourceforge.net/