Posted by Sean P. DeNigris on Jul 28, 2020; 3:21pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Microdown-tp5119381p5120088.html

NorbertHartl wrote
> Microdown is a subset of markdown that can parse to a pillar model. So the
> discussions about pillar markup have finally settled and we have a syntax
> format that reads well in ascii which can be used in class comments even
> if it is a basic image.

Rich text comments are an exciting development!

I'd like to understand the benefit of Microdown vs. full Pillar syntax.
Presumably the primary benefit is the size of the codebase. Any other
reasons?

Generally, I wonder about minimalism when it applies to areas of the system
that seem inherently non-minimalist e.g. test harnesses, documentation, etc.
I though a lot about this when trying to document and refactor SDL. The lack
of a mock library in core was a big barrier to understanding the
interactions between SDL objects. Maybe I'm being naive, but I feel like if
someone wants a minimal image, they're not going to want to load SUnit or
rich text documentation *at all*, so I don't see the risk-benefit of
crippling these features.

A few other questions about the "rich text doc" roadmap:
1. Could/will this be extended to method comments? That would be really cool
:)
2. How close are we for someone to use full Pillar syntax in class comments
in their own library? Any plans to make this possible?



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Cheers,
Sean
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Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Developers-f1294837.html