[ANN] discount

david parsons
Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:04:57 -0000

I've written an implementation of Markdown in C, for people like me
who shout BAH! and wave their canes at modern programming languages.
(I needed a decent markup language for my website and weblog, and
didn't want to have to install any new programming languages on the
machine.)

Discount <http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount> has been in
production for the past two and a half months, and is moving slowly
enough so that it actually counts as stable.    It includes a standalone
markdown interpreter, a library, and a couple of sample programs that
I use for generating webpages.

There are some whoppingly nonstandard extensions:

   1. you can configure the interpreter with 8-character tabstops.
   2. definition lists, using
	 =item	     text
	 =item	     text
   3. a small stack of smartypantish character substitutions
   4. pseudo-protocol extensions
- [foo](class:bar) -- wrap foo in
- [foo](id:bar) -- wrap foo in
      - [foo](raw:bar) -- emit bar without any processing
   5. size extensions for images, via
      ![alt](image =WWWxHHH "title")
   6. pandoc-style header blocks
7. block elements, which are squirreled away by the
      library and can be retrieved by web-page generators.


Despite all this, discount still passes MarkdownTest_1.0 when
I turn extensions off and turn --tidy on.



-david parsons