New Code!
Discount has, after an extremely long round of design & prototyping a fix for a long-standing parsing bug, been shoved up to version 1.4.3. 1.4.3 replaces (again) the parser for the url in a []() construct, and, as a little something extra, adds Plan 9 support in the form of a mkfile, USG-manpage versions of markdown.1 and markdown.6, and a plan 9-specific README for people who want to use discount on that platform.
The Plan 9 support (provided by Josh Wood) is untested by me (I don’t have any working Plan9 machines,) but I’m confident that it works. The parsing rewrite for []() changes that parser to be more in line with
the markdown dingus @ daringfireball; URLs that contain a multiple quotes in the middle are now treated as URLs instead of URLs plus a title, plus the exciting feature of greedy urls is now in my code ( so a link like [Poe's Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/Poe's Law) will generate the desired link, but that link followed by a parenthetical comment ('but,' he said, 'it won't work') will magically become a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/Poe with a title of s Law)…'it won't work.
(And there are a lot of fun edge cases out there that have the same behavior. Mike Schiraldi has been testing discount and is a cornucopia of horrifying edge cases.)
Amazingly, it still passes my test suite and the MarkdownTest_1.0 and MarkdownTest_1.0.3 testsuites, so it’s the ideal New Code! for you to upload and watch explode in the luxury of your own home. I’ve spent a lot of time designing this latest version of the []() parser (and only managed to figure it out when I was riding a 50-odd mile loop up to Joe’s Donuts in Sandy and thus had four hours where I couldn’t distract myself by reading Usenet instead) so it may actually not be a horrible machine eating monster instead of a useful update to my code.