FormalizingStructuredText

The Problem

Although StructuredText is clearly useful, there is some disagreement about what its semantics is/should be. This disagreement is complicated by the facts that:

• StructuredText has never been fully formalized.
• At least 3 versions of StructuredText have been implemented: ClassicStructuredText?, StructuredTextNG, and STpy?.

The STminus project

In order to help resolve these issues, I (EdwardLoper) am beginning the STminus project. The primary goal of this project is to create a formal description of StructuredText. This formalization will be expressed in EBNF with lookahead. Since StructuredText is in reality a loosely defined family of markup languages, the project will restrict itself to two defining particular StructuredText languages: StructuredTextNG and STpy?. It will not attempt to capture the semantics or structure of ClassicStructuredText?.

Read more about this project at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~edloper/pydoc/stminus.html

If you wish to play with your own copy of STminus, just send me email at [email protected]. Once I have finished cleaning up the code and documenting it better, I will put a link to it here.

Regression Test Cases

In conjuction with the STminus project, I (EdwardLoper) am creating a large set of test cases, which should be useable by STminus, StructuredTextNG, and STpy?. Each test case consists of a self-documenting StructuredText string. The test cases are organized to form the sttest.py module:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~edloper/pydoc/sttest.py

To look at a complete list of the test cases, properly parsed, see the test-set output for STminus version 002:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~edloper/pydoc/stminus002-test.html