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Re: [ddlm-group] Case sensitivity

If the consensus is lower-case data names, why not make this part of the 
CIF2 standard?

My suggestion is that every data name should have a "printed form" 
defined in the dictionary. That allows upper-case, spaces, subscripts, 
etc. Then, the item name "I_over_sigmaI" can be written as something 
like "I / sigma(I)". Maybe some already do this?

With UTF-8 support, names can include non-ASCII characters, such as 
Greek letters. If non-ASCII characters are used, it might be good to 
have a plain ASCII alias rather than assume that UTF-8 is ubiquitous.

Joe


David Brown wrote:
> There was discussion about case sensitivity of data names at the COMCIFS 
> meeting in Osaka.  My recollection is that we agreed that names should 
> be case sensitive, and to avoid problems with having two data names that 
> differ only in their cases, all data names should be lower case.  There 
> are legacy problems because in DDL1 the data names are case insensitive, 
> and while most of the names have been written in lower case, upper case 
> letters have been traditionally used for proper names, e.g., 
> _space_group_name_Hall.  There may well be legacy CIFs in which only 
> lower case letters have been used but probably not many.
> 
> DAvid
> 
> Joe Krahn wrote:
>> Is there any interest in making CIF2 case-sensitive, at least data names?
>>
>> There was some discussion that names may eventually extend into the UTF 
>> range, even though it would be avoided for the near future. That 
>> complicates case-insensitive matching, because standard library 
>> functions are locale dependent. If data names are not strictly limited 
>> to 7-bit ASCII, it would be good to make names case-sensitive.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Joe Krahn
>> _______________________________________________
>> ddlm-group mailing list
>> ddlm-group@iucr.org
>> http://scripts.iucr.org/mailman/listinfo/ddlm-group
> 
> 

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