Re: [invisibleXML/ixml] Normalizing line endings in ixml inputs (Issue #192)

Why not \n - which anyone coding since the advent of C will recognise?

Sent from my iPad

> On 25 Oct 2023, at 09:44, Norm Tovey-Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> wrote:
> 
> [ Steven’s reply quoted below is a comment on issue #192 where I added a
>  link. I’m replying to the mailing list where I emailed a longer
>  description of the proposal yesterday. We should pick a medium for
>  discussion, I suppose. ]
> 
> Steven Pemberton <notifications@github.com> writes:
>> Apparently I'm not receiving all mail from W3C, because I didn't
>> receive the referenced email, but I see a 4th alternative, namely to
>> have a specific notation for newline, that implementations would map
>> to the local machine's newline convention.
> 
> That’s a possibility, I guess, but…
> 
>> That way there is a generalised notation of newlines, without
>> excluding other uses of the characters involved, nor requiring the
>> implementations to mess with the input stream.
> 
> So they have to mess with the grammar instead? I have to replace the
> notation for newline with the system’s newline conventions when I
> construct the grammar? That doesn’t strike me as easier to do or easier
> to understand.
> 
>> Using / as a strawperson, since that is what is used in poetry: 
>> 
>> file = line++/, /*. 
>> line = ~[/]+. 
> 
> I worry that users are going to find this quite confusing. First,
> there’s the challenge of remembering that “/” is different from “"/"“.
> Then there’s the fact that using the literal convention of the system on
> which the grammar is developed will work. I think users on, for example
> Windows, are much much more likely to use #D #A because that’s what
> they’re used to than they are to remember that iXML has a special
> metasyntactic character “/” for “end-of-line”. And this also seems like
> an unnecessary use of one of the few remaining punctuation symbols that
> we might want to use in the future.
> 
> This also doesn’t help in cases where I have files (as the test suite
> does) that have different line-ending conventions. Test suite documents
> created on Windows have #D #A, test suite documents created on Mac/Unix
> have #A.
> 
> I think it would be much, much simpler and more robust to say that iXML
> treats the input stream as a text file with lines delimited consistently
> by a (insert choice-to-be-decided here) character.
> 
>                                        Be seeing you,
>                                          norm
> 
> --
> Norm Tovey-Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
> https://norm.tovey-walsh.com/
> 
>> …it is significant that we are called the 'information society'—not the
>> thinking society, not the deliberative society, not the society of
>> reason and rationality.--Lloyd Morrisett