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Re: Dictionary Status Update (names; special characters)

bm@iucr.ac.uk
Tue, 30 Jan 1996 13:09:02 GMT 

Howdy

> * With respect to the format for names, it was my recollection that COMCIFS
>   has already discussed how to deal with Jr, III, etc.  We have written to
>   Brian McMahon to see if he can tell us what the decision was.

I'm sorry the prompt was necessary - I had intended to reply earlier when
this point was raised. We decided to adopt the convention (which is broadly
compatible with the approach taken in the World Directory, although that
explicitly separates family from given names) that a composite name should
be understood to have the form

    '(surname) (dynastic modifier), (title) (forenames)'

where any of the bracketed elements might be omitted. (This is to be taken
as an informal representation, by the way, not a regular expression or
_type_construct!)  Thus,

     'Bleary Jr, Percival R.'   'Churchill III, Mr Winston S.'  etc.

This is broadly compatible with Lynn's suggestion (parse everything to the
first comma as a family name).

 
> * We are assuming that . and ? are part of the STAR grammar.  As such, they
>   do not need to be included in each regular expression.  The assumption
>   is that a parser would check for . and ? first, and, failing to find them,
>   proceed to validate the item against the regular expression.

Strictly, the '.' and '?' characters have no special meaning in the STAR
syntax - they're just text tokens. They are assigned special meanings
("value has no meaning" and "value is not known") in CIF and MIF applications.
It is appropriate that these should be handled in the way suggested (i.e.
the parser should check for them before validating against a regular
expression), and this is one of the rules of good practice that should be
published in some form, as part of the overall documentation of CIF
knowledge. I would like to put together a small booklet of such things
(including, for instance, Peter Keller's report under construction which
will provide a rigorous and annotated BNF for STAR), somewhat in the style
of the IUCr Guide to CIF for Authors ("Guide to CIF for Programmers" ?).
It may take a little while to get this started, but I'd be glad to hear
from anyone willing to join in this project.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Brian McMahon                                             tel: +44 1244 342878
Research and Development Officer                          fax: +44 1244 314888
International Union of Crystallography                  e-mail:  bm@iucr.ac.uk
5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, England