Markdown Discuss - Apr 2008 - markdown PEG (parsing expression grammar)

There's been a lot of discussion on this list about creating a formal
grammar for markdown. I had a go at writing a [parsing expression
grammar] for markdown. I used Haskell and John Meacham's Frisby PEG
parsing library, but it should not be too hard to port the grammar
to PEG libraries in other languages.

[parsing expression grammar]:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar

The code is at <http://github.com/jgm/markdown-peg/tree/master>.
All that is required to compile it is the GHC haskell compiler.
The grammar itself begins at line 68 of Markdown.hs:
<http://github.com/jgm/markdown-peg/tree/master/Markdown.hs#L68>.

This implementation is not particularly fast, though it is still
faster than Markdown.pl. It should be fairly easy to modify and extend,
though, and the grammar provides a precise specification of (one
interpretation of!) the syntax of markdown, which might be a useful
basis for discussion.

John

Forgive my ignorance, but can this sort of grammar be converted to the  
form used by lex and yacc?

--
Dr. Drang
www.leancrew.com/all-this

On Apr 6, 2008, at 12:50 PM, John MacFarlane <jgm at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> There's been a lot of discussion on this list about creating a formal
> grammar for markdown. I had a go at writing a [parsing expression
> grammar] for markdown. I used Haskell and John Meacham's Frisby PEG
> parsing library, but it should not be too hard to port the grammar
> to PEG libraries in other languages.