Re: Turtle implementation report for RDF::Trine

On Apr 17, 2013, at 11:02 PM, Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org> wrote:

> I think everyone's gazing into their crystal balls and trying to figure out how to balance these competing constraints:
> 
>  simplicity -- primarily, don't confuse authors. secondarily, don't be cruel to developers.

I think having two different syntaxes for prefix declarations, with two different rules for the trailing dot, fails here. I've implemented this stuff many times over and use these syntaxes all the time, and I still fail to get the trailing dot syntax correct.

>  compatibility with SPARQL -- make it as easy as possible to copy stuff (triples and directives) between Turtle and SPARQL.

I'm sympathetic here, but for me the added grammar complexity required makes this a losing proposition. And this wouldn't be a simple copy-paste job, either. It would require at least two copy-paste operations to avoid the SPARQL query type, projection, braces, etc. that come between the prefixes and any ground triples that appear in the query graph pattern.

>  backward compatibility -- there's a *lot* of Turtle out there.
> 
> The user time question you raised is exemplified in the case where someone is copying prefixes from a SPARQL query. I would argue that ideally, we'd see one popular representation for prefix (and base) declarations and it would be compatible with SPARQL (fixing the '@'s and '.'s is frustrating for many users). The big question is how reallistic is it that we can migrate there from our current widely-deployed '@' directives and how can we balance short-term and long-term interests.

Like I said, my opinion is that keeping just a single syntax for prefixes would be best. But assuming two syntaxes are eventually supported, do you see any obvious problems with having the trailing dot be optional?

thanks,
.greg

Received on Wednesday, 17 April 2013 14:13:23 UTC