Thread:Talk:Markup spec/Language generation and grammar type/reply

First of all: you're right.

This came from the eternal discussion about the grammar type that generates Wikicode. There are (are least, there were) lots of opinions and lots of people arguing that wikicode was a 'context-sensitive' language, mostly because they do not know what a 'context-sensitive' language is. I tried to put some light on the topic when I wrote that section, but I recognize it seems that I'm trying to argue that Wikicode can be described with a context-free grammar, when, as you very well point, that is out of the question.

Having said that, you are most welcome to do whatever changes you think are necessary to clarify what I did.

Concerning your last paragraph, I also found that surprising. I was also surprised when I got to know that the parser is not implemented with the usual context-free recognizer, but instead... with a series of regular expressions, applied one after the another. At a glance I do not know if that's equivalent to the pushdown automaton required to analyze a context-free language, but anyways. It's C programming, anything can be done.