[IPython-dev] notebook questions

[Fernando Perez]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:44 PM, Gael Varoquaux
<gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:
>
> It seems to me wrong to go with any other markup language, given that the
> standard in the Python world in reST. It is hard enough to agree on
> standards, let us rejoice that there is one.

I would have hoped for less of a cheap shot coming from you.

We've explained (I said it many times at Euroscipy, with lots of
detail)  that there are *technical* reasons why we weren't able to put
reST/shpinx integration into the notebook from day one, despite all of
us desperately wanting it.  We've heard of sphinx before, believe it
or not.

But the design of reST, in particular the highly stateful nature of
the parsing process that makes whole-document multi-pass processing
more or less mandatory, makes it complex and costly to implement.
It's especially hard in an environment like the notebook, where you'd
like to provide immediate feedback on a per-cell basis while keeping
the load on the server as light as possible, and the number of
asynchronous processes in flight to a minimum (these add complexity
and brittleness).

Cheers,

f