Re: trailing '.' and ';' but no ','

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 20:40:39 -0400, Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org> wrote:

> cwm, Turtle and SPARQL allow trailing '.' and ';' but not ',' . I made
> a pitch to DanC to suggest that trailing ';'s are more confusing than
> liberating, but he may have convinced me otherwise. The distinction
> between ';'s and ','s seems arbitrary.

Actually Turtle at least requires a trailing '.'.  As far as I know
SPARQL requires it between triples and is optional after.  Don't know
about cwm/N3.

> Are we at an optimum now? Should n3.n3 (and turtle and SPARQL) change
> to allow trailing ','s? 
>
> objecttail cfg:mustBeOneSequence (
>                 ( )
>                 ( "," )
>                 ( ","   object objecttail )
> ).
> 
> Should we get rid of trailing ';'s?

I prefer not from what I hear as feedback to Turtle and see people
using in data.  It is much more common to have a subject followed by
a list of pred1 obj1; pred2 obj2; ... than it is to have the same
subject and predicate followed by a list of obj1, obj2, ....

Allowing a trailing ; for the pred+obj lists is friendly to what
appears more often written by humans and also to software where it's
handy to just "printf":
  subj
    pred1 obj1 ;
    pred2 obj2 ;
...
then end with a
  .

Than worry about the special case of the last item .

> I notice that we are also under-utilizing umlauts and plus there's the
> extensive set of graphics characters near kanji that are well-utilized
> in spam.

Is that a new N3 design principle you've discovered? :)

Dave

Received on Monday, 13 June 2005 11:12:06 UTC