Re: [Turtle CR Issue] whitespace before '.' and ';'

On 02/10/13 16:21, Andy Seaborne wrote:
> On 02/10/13 13:25, Eric Prud'hommeaux wrote:
>> We have two issues going back to Feb with people requesting whitespace
>> before '.' and ';', i.e.
>>
>>    <s> <p> <o> . # good
>>    <s> <p> <o>. # bad
>>    <s> <p> <o> ; <p2> <o2> . # good
>>    <s> <p> <o>; <p2> <o2> . # bad
>>
>> We discussed the grammar at length but this never came up. Proposal:
>> answer comments 1 and 2 with "The RDF Working Group believes that
>> introducing a requirement for whitespace before '.' and ';' will break
>> a considerable fraction of the deployed Turtle and introduce
>> unfortunate incompatibilities with SPARQL and Notation3." Note that
>> commentor 1 is responding to lookahead required when implementing a
>> parser without a separate greedy lexer and commenter 2 is backing up 1
>> with a usability argument.
>>
>> Comments:
>> <http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/wiki/Turtle_Candidate_Recommendation_Comments#Issues>
>>
>> comment 1:
>> http://www.w3.org/mid/1361141033.16176.30.camel@verne.drobilla.net
>> comment 2: http://www.w3.org/mid/1361211939.4549.115.camel@dbooth-w530
>>
>
> Agreed - many traditional Turtle and existing data would break (inc
> Freebase)
>
> SPARQL compatibility is weakened.  We had a trailing dot on prefix names
> there as well.

Missing word:

"We had a trailing dot on prefix names *discussion* there as well."

> It is actually a very big change - we'd need to change the whitespace
> rules, as the grammar part does not mention WS; essentially adding WS
> into the rules part.
>
>      Andy

Received on Wednesday, 2 October 2013 16:39:38 UTC