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

There is a difference between insisting in a formal grammar that a value
token is treated differently at one level than it is at another level, as
opposed to requiring CIF writers to pad whitespace between value tokens at
one level, but not at another level.

My reading of the previous mail was that the balance of opinion was to
formally terminate with the single token (irrespective of whitespace) and
then requiring/asking/pleading/whatever-verb writers to pad token, which
they and we all do anyway. I repeat again the formal specification of the
language needs to be strict and consistent (Brian's maximally disruptive),
and the parsers can be more loosely (deprecatingly?) implemented.

However I detect a certain level of inconsistency in arguments here. What
does "human readability" have to do with it? We just had a discussion on
UTF-8 where it was argued in the near future no-one is going to be
vim-img/emacs-ing/grep-ping these files and it will all be driven by
applications. What happened to human readability then?


On 13/10/09 8:36 PM, "James Hester" <jamesrhester@gmail.com> wrote:

> I, for one, do not agree with dropping the requirement for whitespace
> between tokens outside compound structures.  Is the only justification
> avoiding a second production rule in the formal grammar?  I would like
> to think we are getting more than this in return for sacrificing human
> readability: see previous email somewhere long ago in this thread.

cheers

Nick

--------------------------------
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School of Computer Science & Software Engineering

The University of Western Australia    t: +61 (0)8 6488 3452
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