Pragmas summary for the meeting today

Hi folks,

There was some discussion of pragmas, and the meaning of pragmas, in
email over the past week. I don’t think anyone who participated
expressed a wildly divergent opinion about what a pragma is or whether
or not we need them.

I propose that we are near consensus on the following points.

1. Roughly speaking, a pragma is a mechanism for communicating
   extra-grammatical information in an ixml grammar. It is more than a
   comment, but like a comment, it can be ignored. We can fine tune
   the wording and discuss conformance statements in email.

2. While we (probably) don’t all agree that all the possible uses of
   pragmas are reasonable, there’s enough agreement for some of them
   to support adding a pragma mechanism to ixml.

3. I think we could all live with pragmas delimited by {| and |}.
   Possibly also by ⦃ and ⦄, but we don’t need to decide that today.

4. Pragmas need a small bit of internal structure in a way that
   comments do not. Pragmas should have at least a name and a
   definition that allows them to nest. Precise details taken as an
   action item for someone, but roughly: “{|”, name, stuff, “|}”.

5. Opinion is still fairly divided on what format pragma names should
   have. Some folks are committed to a mechanism for distributed
   invention of globally unique pragma names, and others are not so
   committed.

   I propose that we agree we have rough consensus on points 1-4, and we
   further agree to add pragmas with unqualified names now. We can
   continue that discussion along with/in light of the inevitable
   discussion about whether or not ixml should support QNames in vxml.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh
Saxonica