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Re: [ddlm-group] THREAD 3: The alphabet of non-delimited strings.

As specification (which I have said must be strict, notwithstanding parser
implementations may be individually more liberal) I will propose 1.2, 2.3
with the added restrictions on "" and '', and ascii-fied unicode in strings.

With an addition that the specification can suggest/implore (insert
whatever) cif WRITERS under the new specification should pad at least one
space between tokens. In that way old parsers should still handled these
strings the same way. I think this is really redundant because I think all
writers will pad tokens anyway (all my parsers do). In fact I know of no
auto code generator that does not pad tokens, even though it is not required
under the strict specification.

I want to move forward on this because this has been 12 years in the making
and we are still at the syntax discussion phase, even though the Perth group
has shown proof of concept systems. The problem with those is we worked in a
restricted syntax so we could do things, now we need that enshrined.

As for your comment on binary Herb, we will need to discuss this when I am
up at Dowling. I didn't think I was excommunicating imgCIF but I have not
been in that loop of late so I may be missing something. I thought imgCIF
was a pure ascii equivalent of CBF, so I see my solution as maintaining the
status quo. CBF has a pure ascii header followed by binary blocks, tagged by
a "smart comment(s)", does it not? I see UTF-8 embedding as creating
situation where the pure ascii header of CBF will now have the possibility
of binary mixed in. I would think this will prove a problem for people. But
we can discuss the details of this next week.

As for voting, I get the feeling Brian and John are going to take a back
seat for various reasons. It may only be a vote of 3? At the moment with
James on leave it is just me and you, dude. I think however with my time at
Dowling we two will get some productive movement on this.


On 9/10/09 8:45 AM, "Herbert J. Bernstein" <yaya@bernstein-plus-sons.com>
wrote:

> Dear Nick,
> 
> P.S.  From your comments about binary, it sounds as if you intend to
> "excommunicate" imgCIF from DDLm.  I think that would be a mistake. imgCIF
> will benefit greatly from the use of methods, but at worst, I can always
> go back to the original name:  imgNCIF, where the N stands for "not", and
> use methods without the blessing of it being officially a "CIF"
> dictionary.


cheers

Nick

--------------------------------
Associate Professor N. Spadaccini, PhD
School of Computer Science & Software Engineering

The University of Western Australia    t: +61 (0)8 6488 3452
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CRAWLEY, Perth,  WA  6009 AUSTRALIA   w3: www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~nick
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e: Nick.Spadaccini@uwa.edu.au





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