Re: Pragma Proposal ready for review

> On 14,Dec2021, at 4:18 AM, Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl> wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure quite how to say this, but this proposal shocked me, because it is not at all what I thought we had agreed we were doing.

If it reassures anyone, I don’t think Tom and I believe the group has 
agreed to this proposal, only to considering the proposal once
Tom and I had worked it out.

> 
> I was expecting a proposal for a syntax to communicate with implementations, that further had no defined semantic content; something that allows things along the lines of
> 
>    {! ignore ambiguity}
>    {! serialize all parses}
>    {! serialize to json}
> 
> (though without specifying the "ignore ambiguity" bits, which would be specified by implementations).

I should apologize, then, for the apparent opacity of the proposal,
because I think that that is essentially what you have before you.

There is only one thing that the current proposal does that
your sketch appears not to do:  it allows different pragmas to
be defined by different people without collisions.  Otherwise,
we risk having multiple different groups or individuals defining
incompatible meanings for 

    ‘ignore ambiguity’

and having processors fail because they try to obey 
instructions that were not in fact meant for them.

> 
> Any other issue, particular semantic ones, such as namespaces, text insertion and so on, are separate use cases, that need to be discussed separately, but have absolutely no place in pragmas, because pragmas are exactly about things that are not standardised.

Namespaces, or some other collision avoidance mechanism, seem
to Tom and me a necessary pre-requisite for pragmas as we
would like them to work.

I would oppose any pragma proposal that doesn’t have some way
of preventing collisions — it would be no more helpful than just
using structured comments.

Michael


> 
> Steven 
> 
> On Tuesday 07 December 2021 18:15:43 (+01:00), Tom Hillman wrote:
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> The proposal for pragma that Michael and I have been working on for some weeks is now ready for review in advance of our meeting next week:
> 
> https://github.com/invisibleXML/ixml/pull/10
> 
> Our hope is that this will give us a clear idea of which minimal features of pragma would need to be supported for a 1.0 release of iXML so that
>  • Pragma implementers will be able to do something useful with them in the future,
>  • non-pragma supporting processors know enough to know what they can ignore for "fallback" behaviours.
> To that end, the proposal details
>  • Identified Requirements and Desiderata
>  • A proposed syntax
>  • Several use cases with worked examples
>  • Suggested updates to the iXML grammar
> Our hope is that we can make a decision on whether or not we include any pragma considerations for a release at XML Prague, if we decide that such a release is a goal of the group; if we do decide to do both of those things, I would like to (co-)write a paper as part of making a noise for release.
> 
> Next week's meeting is shaping up to be quite busy, so if folk could possibly take a look in advance, it might save us some precious time on the day!
> 
> Thanks,
> Tom
> 
> _________________
> Tomos Hillman
> eXpertML Ltd
> +44 7793 242058

Received on Tuesday, 14 December 2021 14:36:34 UTC