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Re: [ddlm-group] Revisiting list delimiters. .


On Thursday, April 07, 2011 2:34 AM, James Hester wrote:

>I apologise for the lack of detail in my introductory posting. If
>there is to be no quick agreement on the following, more formal,
>proposal, then I am happy to withdraw the proposal completely and we
>will continue on our previously agreed path.
>
>Note that I see no value in picking over Nick et. al's code as that
>code is not the final arbiter of every detail of what is or isn't in
>the standard - I was simply pointing out that it would be less work to
>fix the code to conform to the new standard if we don't deviate too
>far from the original.
>
>Here is my formal proposal: that a list be described by the following
>productions:
>
><list> = '[' <whitespace>* {<listdatavalue> {<comma or
>whitespace><listdatavalue>}*}* ']'
><listdatavalue> = {<list>|<string>}<whitespace>*

I still maintain that the situation is essentially unchanged from the last time this matter was discussed.  In particular, unless I greatly underestimate the relative difficulties of the software modifications that would be needed, the significance of any one-time cost difference for those changes is miniscule relative to that of the ongoing (but less tangible) costs of adopting an otherwise inferior solution.

I acknowledge that commas, whitespace, and combinations of those as token separators all have merits, but from the perspective of CIF overall, I firmly believe that whitespace as the only list token separators remains the best solution.  I withhold further technical commentary at this time, in the hope that it will be unnecessary.


Regards,

John


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