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dotnet / runtime

.NET is a cross-platform runtime for cloud, mobile, desktop, and IoT apps.
https://docs.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/
MIT License
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Publish ECMA-335 in Markdown #36838

Open reflectronic opened 4 years ago

reflectronic commented 4 years ago

The ECMA-335 specification is currently only available in PDF format. Other specifications from Microsoft, like the C# language specification, are available in Markdown format. Is there a plan to publish a plaintext version of ECMA-335, in a format like Markdown?

AaronRobinsonMSFT commented 4 years ago

@reflectronic Just tried to convert ECMA-335 using https://pdf2md.morethan.io/. Was a bit of a mess. Updating that document to markdown is probably a long thankless task. I don't believe we have any such plans. Unsure if we would want to put that in this repo though. Perhaps in https://github.com/dotnet/designs?

reflectronic commented 4 years ago

Well, whichever repo it goes in is ultimately not that important. There is already ECMA-335 related stuff in this repo though, and plenty of other design documents.

probably a long thankless task

Well, since I'm stuck at home, I've got time 😄 At least it will fix the unsightly use of Comic Sans

jkotas commented 4 years ago

Note that ECMA-335 has copyright license that has to be respected for anything derived from it.

stakx commented 4 years ago

FYI, as it happens, I have just recently begun a manual conversion of ECMA-335 to Markdown. It's mostly complete: https://github.com/stakx/ecma-335.

I'd be happy to contribute this to a more official repo if there is interest for it.

(I've also been considering using that Markdown version as a starting point for a Docbook version, which would be more suitable for preparing the standard in a variety of output formats.)

@jkotas, agreed about heeding the copyright. As I understand the ECMA-335 copyright notice, it explicitly allows conversions to different languages and formats, so this shouldn't be a roadblock in principle.

With regard to my Markdown version, I should mention that I did opt to fix some typos and make formatting more consistent in a very few places—those divergences from the original document could possibly be seen as copyright infringements, and may have to be reverted.