Problems with prolog

Apart from the American spelling, I have some issues with prolog. Up until 
now it hasn't been necessary, so I still see a window of possibilities to 
fix it.

1. The syntax. It looks too much like a rule, and needs too much lookahead 
to resolve. Most of ixml was designed not to need lookahead in order to 
make bootstrapping easy. 

 ixml { this may or not be a rule, who knows. Let me just copy the first 
chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses here, while we think about it: Stately 
Plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead.....} version "I don't really 
care".

 ixml { this may or not be a rule, who knows. Let me just copy the first 
chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses here, while we think about it: Stately 
Plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead.....}: version, "I don't really 
care".

2. The semantics. The default is version 1.0, but if I say 
 ixml version "I really don't care". 
    all of a sudden it will use whatever version of ixml it can. So remind 
me why we care which version is specified. Its only possible use at the 
moment would be to prevent the use of renaming.
    I would personally prefer the absence of a version to imply the use of 
any version it can as well.

"If an implementation recognizes the version string, it must process the 
grammar using the syntax and semantics of that version." This I think 
allows implementations to not recognise all version strings.


Steven

Received on Tuesday, 17 October 2023 13:36:43 UTC