Re: On pragmas…

Sorry, coming to this late. Busy week.

> 1. What are pragmas?
>
> They’re mechanism for a grammar author to signal that something is
> special about some part of the grammar. 
Which I disagree with. At least what I thought we'd agreed on at the beginning when Michael and Tom went off to design a notation.

I was anticipating a mechanism to signal to the processor "Use a different input encoding" "Use a different parser" "Output all parses" "Don't mark serializations as ambiguous", etc.

I was absolutely not expecting a mechanism to change the interpretation of ixml, in any way at all.

> This is unsatisfactory in a couple of ways. First, it’s impossible to
> distinguish between the pragmas that are intended to apply to the
> grammar as a whole and the pragmas that are supposed to apply to the
> first rule. 

Which is why I am against pragmas that change the syntax or meaning of ixml.

So I think the underlying problem is that we disagree what pragmas are for.

If people want to try and make a new version of ixml that does different things, by all means go for it. But not in a way that it becomes sort of, but also not sort of, ixml.

Steven

Received on Tuesday, 29 March 2022 14:13:39 UTC