Garbled section in spec.md

[pmmccorm]

It appears that the default-methods section is garbled or not rendering correctly, see:

https://github.com/gracelang/language/blob/master/spec.md#default-methods

[kjx]

Hmm, according to the logs this was a change by @apblack -- not sure why though?

[apblack]

How are you rendering the makerdown? The pdf and html produced by pandoc look fine. You should be aware that Github doesn't implement everything that pandoc does. In particular, github-flavoured markdown doesn't seem to provide a way to do multi-line tables, which is what is needed here. Look, for example, at http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~black/OOP/GraceResources/spec.html#default-methods and http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~black/OOP/GraceResources/spec.pdf

I think that the commit message explains why I made the changes.

If I'm wrong, and you can find multi-line table markdown that works for github as well as pandoc, then by all means go ahead and edit it.

[apblack]

On a related topic, if we want to host the spec on github, then we should look at using Jekyll as a site generator. I'm told that github will run the Jekyll scripts automatically on checkin, and generate the pages: https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-pages-and-jekyll/

Jekyll used "kramdown" flavoured markdown, which does not appear to support multi-line tables. It does let one put raw html into a markdown file, though. Does pandoc allow raw html in a markdown file, and generate correct LaTeX from it?

[kjx]

Jekyll used "kramdown" flavoured markdown, which does not appear to support multi-line tables.

well let's not do multi-line tables then. I seem to remember tweaking the previous version so it looked OK on pandoc latex, pandoc html, and github.

Does pandoc allow raw html in a markdown file, and generate correct LaTeX from it?

probably. but I think we shouldn't do that unless we really, really, really need to (where "unless we really, really, really need to" means "--- we don't need to")

[apblack]

I don't see a problem with using pandoc markdown that github doesn't support. In particular, we use $-escapes in our markdown, since both latex and html formatted versions support them, eveb though github doesn't.

We are looking at Jekyll as a way of getting github to host documentation. Until then, I'm going to close this issue, since it has nothing to do with Grace or its libraries.