undefined | Better HN

0 pointsgalaxyLogic3y ago0 comments

That is an interesting development.

From their Github page I read: "The spec contains over 500 embedded examples which serve as conformance tests."

So it's not so simple any more, is it?

(https://github.com/commonmark/commonmark-spec)

0 comments

Less than a 1000 conformance tests for a standard? Sounds Pretty simple to me, no way you could make an HTML compliance suite that small.

throwaway8943453y ago

> So it's not so simple any more, is it?

I claimed the specification existed, I didn’t claim it was a simple specification.

galaxyLogicOP3y ago

I'm not claiming you claimed it was a simple specification :-)

I just find it interesting. This would indicate to me that there are 500 "features" in the language. I thought mark-down languages just provided a few shortcuts for producing the most commonly needed HTML features and then provide a fallback to HTML. So if you cannot do it in the markdown language, use HTML instead.

Thiez3y ago

I can't really be bothered to take a look at the tests, but I strongly doubt there are actually 500 features. A large part of those tests are probably trying combinations of features. E.g. suppose markdown only had tables as a feature, and nothing else. That feature alone deserves several several tests (for tables of various sizes, edge cases such as having only the header, having rows with an incorrect number of columns, etc.).

But let's assume we can get away with just a single test for tables. And then we introduce the features "section headers" and "bold" and "underline". All these features can interact (e.g. underlined bold section headers), so we want to test combinations of all those features, and have a nice combinatorial explosion.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse