I was kind of surprised that MarkdownSharp wasn’t in the list of reference implementations … is someone going to be revving it to SMD, or is a new SMD-specific implementation going to be made for C#? 
1 Like
You’ll have to ask @balpha, I don’t know the current state of what’s used for Markdown client vs. server side on Stack Exchange. But he would!
You can see that MarkdownSharp has been kept up to date over time with fixes though:
https://code.google.com/p/markdownsharp/source/list
Good work @balpha! I second my earlier recommendation that you not be fired!
3 Likes
+1 for keeping it up over time
-1 for continuing to keep it on code.google.com instead of a platform that allows one to submit pull requests without having to “attach *.patch files of proposed fixes”
1 Like
And I can live happily for another day, yay!
Anyway, MarkdownSharp is one of the many ports of the original Perl version (albeit heavily modified in the meantime). All of these Markdown ports work by appplying a series of regex replacements.
But this new version works in totally different ways, and I doubt that it’s simple to adjust the regex-replacement version to match the spec. Even if it were, I really wouldn’t want to do that – the closer you get to real parsing, the more maintainable, extensible, and comprehensible the implementation is. And tons of regex replacements is pretty far from real parsing. It probably took me three years to really grasp how Markdown (the regex version) works.
So, I’m pretty sure (and may see to it myself) that there will eventually be a C# implementation of this new Markdown. Whether it’ll be called something like MarkdownSharp 2.0 or something else, either way it won’t have a lot to do with the current MD#, code-wise.
3 Likes
Here here … Github please 
Awesome, great to hear that future efforts won’t necessarily stick to the regex model that’s currently used. I too am interested in participating in this effort. Will keep an eye out 