Comments on the ntriples syntax

As described by http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-rdf-testcases-20010912/, 
the ntriples syntax seems designed to discourage automated testing. 
ntriples is  supposed to enable a ``set of machine-processable test 
cases corresponding to technical issues addressed by the WG.'' If 
this is really the case, then comments, variable amounts of 
whitespace and multiple kinds of line separators aren't appropriate, 
since the best oracle for automated compatibility testing is straight 
byte comparison (e.g., UNIX cmp).

I'm also not clear on why a strange escaping mechanism is used 
instead of just mandating the shortest UTF-8 representation and why 
characters are stolen for use as separators, but this is just 
inconvenient.

^L