Re: sbnf (striped BNF)

kifer@cs.sunysb.edu (Michael Kifer) writes:
> Why do you think that this move has not been well-received? 

Because the only public comment I got was from Harold and it was still
advocating top-down (ASN-first) design.  I got one very negative private
comment (also strongly advocating top-down ASN-first design).

> For instance, I
> did not respond, but I always thought that BNF is the way to
> go. 

Yes, but that doesn't mean you support SBNF.  I can't really tell.

> Introducing new notation and doing research on it as we go does not
> look like what we should be doing.

If there were something off-the-shelf that would solve our problems,
that would be great.  Maybe there is, but no one seems able to lead us
to it and help us with it.  I'm doing the best I can in the absense of
other options.

> > In any case, I think I'd want machine-readable data in each dialect
> > definition which told my software which collections were ordered and
> > which were unordered.
> 
> f(a->b,c->d) is not a collection. It is a term. Do you also want to be able
> to express in the syntax that p/\q == q/\p?
> What about p/\(q\/r) == p/\q \/ p/\r?
>
> It beats me why do you want to capture some part of the semantics in the
> definition of the syntax.

I don't think we're going to get anywhere with this discussion.

It makes perfect sense to me that we'd think of the rules in a ruleset
as being in an unordered collection and the arguments in an argument
list being in an ordered collection.  I understand the semantics will be
expressed against the presentaiton syntax, and that's fine, but I think
at least some of us implementing translators will have a much easier
time thinking at the data-model level.

     -- Sandro

Received on Thursday, 6 September 2007 04:06:26 UTC