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[ddlm-group] Comments and folding within lists and tables

• To: Group finalising DDLm and associated dictionaries <ddlm-group@iucr.org>
• Subject: [ddlm-group] Comments and folding within lists and tables
• From: Joe Krahn <krahn@niehs.nih.gov>
• Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:10:40 -0500

COMMENTS:

In the last draft, the section on delimiting "tokens" uses the term 
whitespace, but the list is described as "ASCII space separated data 
values".

Do all blank-space delimiters allow the general definition of 
whitespace, including comments, or are there cases where comments are 
disallowed?

If the defined whitespace is used in all cases, this would be a valid table:

{ #my table
   'hello':world #testing
} #end of table

Also, the list and table initiator/terminator characters do not require 
whitespace around them. Do the 1st and 3rd comments above require 
preceding blank space as defined in STAR? Or, do the "implicit 
delimiter" characteristics of those characters make it optional?


# [UN]FOLDING:
The draft gives the TABLE example:

      { ...
      "description":"""Cubic space group
            and metric cell vectors"""}

Then it says it implies line joining. Does this mean that the string for 
"description" is unwrapped to the one-line string "Cubic space group and 
metric cell vectors"?

To allow for longer strings without inserting a line break, it may be 
better to allow optional space around the colon, so the above example 
could be written as:

      { ...
        "description":
        "Cubic space group and metric cell vectors"
      }

The exclusion of : from non-quoted strings prevents this from being 
ambiguous, so I don't see a good reason not to allow whitespace around 
the colon, or perhaps only following it.

Thanks,
Joe Krahn
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