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Re: CIF specification: reserved prefixes

Sorry Brian, my email address has changed so I think my first
COMCIFs email may have gone to /dev/null.
Maybe this one should too. 
Buf for what its worth ....

At 12:06 PM +0000 10/28/03, Brian McMahon wrote:
>I can in fact see no useful purpose in permitting an underscore *within* a
>registered prefix - it simply complicates the task of the parser. At this

Probably misunderstandings on my part, but I had the impression that
_data_name_tags had no semantic meaning of their own and parsing them is
therefore against CIF philosophy. All the meaning is embedded in the
associated dictionary definition for which there should be a precise string
match.

On the other hand, I thought that "." characters were synonymous with
underscores in ddl2 and _ddl2_data.name_tags[] needed to be parsed and
interpreted. So perhaps ".", "[" and "]" characters should also be banned
 from prefixes in order not to trip up any software making such
 philosophically corrupt interpretations?

Doug du Boulay

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