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Re: [ddlm-group] Fwd: Fwd: Searching for a compromise on eliding. .


On Monday, February 28, 2011 7:46 AM, Herbert J. Bernstein wrote:

>   Let us call G with the Python behavior on \\ GP, then my preference voting woud be
>
>
>   P > P-prime > F = GP
>
>and all are tolerable.  I prefer P to P-prime for completeness, esp in dealing with unicode.  I prefer P-prime to F or GP for completeness, but find F and GP tolerable because they are at least reasonably consistent with P and P-prime, esp. in folding lines that contain various patterns of backslashes.

Personally, I find GP slightly preferable to G, just as I find F slightly preferable to F'.  I agree with Herbert that a means to elide the elide character (F or GP) is technically preferrable to context-sensitive elision (F' or G), even though the two approaches have equal expressive power.  If nothing else, GP and F will be slightly easier to process, and a bit more friendly to reformatting.  Also, although I do not share Herbert's confidence that CIF will need or want to adopt a P-family syntax in the future, I do see enough chance of that to accept future consistency as a reasonable factor to consider, though I assign it much less weight than Herbert does.

Considering technical factors only, I prefer F / F' to G[``] / G'[``] because the former do not obligate us to add another character to those that cannot start a whitespace-delimited value.  (That consideration influenced my suggestion of "'" and '"' as delimiters to use with G.)

Any of these F-family proposals is acceptable, however, and I would prefer any of them to P', which in turn I prefer to P.


Regards,

John

--
John C. Bollinger, Ph.D.
Department of Structural Biology
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital




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