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paper-machine comments on [LINK] Steven Landsburg "Accounting for Numbers" - response to EY's "Logical Pinpointing" - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: David_Gerard 14 November 2012 12:55PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 14 November 2012 08:11:44PM 1 point [-]

Oh, I see -- a specification in the style of "only perl can parse perl."

But then these "most implementations" are not implementations of "standard Markdown," hence my confusion.

Comment author: thomblake 15 November 2012 06:52:36PM 0 points [-]

But then these "most implementations" are not implementations of "standard Markdown,"

Note the qualifier - "most implementations that work with client data". Markdown is also used extensively to generate static content that is not user-generated.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 November 2012 07:17:25PM 0 points [-]

There are still multiple implementations used in generating static content, no two of which really do the same thing, e.g., pandoc, multimarkdown, and etc. These are all still arguably "markdown" (at least, they call themselves that) but don't conform to standard markdown as you understand it.

Comment author: Clippy 15 November 2012 07:15:15PM 0 points [-]

Oh, I see -- a specification in the style of "only perl can parse perl."

All universal programming languages (assembler, C, CLIP, Lisp, Cobol, Python, Java) can parse perl as well.

Comment author: thomblake 15 November 2012 09:00:29PM 0 points [-]

All universal programming languages (assembler, C, CLIP, Lisp, Cobol, Python, Java) can parse perl as well.

Only if they implement Perl, perfectly mimicking the functionality of perl (the only spec for Perl). Amongst other difficulties, Perl has available the full power of Perl at the preprocessing stage.

Comment author: Clippy 15 November 2012 11:44:51PM 0 points [-]

That doesn't matter, kind of like non-paperclips.