Re: ABNF or code fragments?

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 11:48 PM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:25:05 +0800, Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 23 feb 2010, at 10:56, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
>>>>
>>>> But now I have a more serious question: it seems that the current draft
>>>> has gotten all ABNF removed, and replaced by code fragments??!?
>>>>
>>>> I don't remember that such a change has come up during a teleconf.
>>>> Moreover, it is something that I have serious misgivings about: in a
>>>> standards document we should use formal declarative languages such as ABNF
>>>> as much as possible, and not vague english-based procedural pseudo-code...
>>>
>>> The syntax is defined by ABNF and is still there, just split across
>>> sections and using the W3C XML spec contructs instead of a big blob.
>>
>> Well... The ABNF that we used to have seems to be replaced by some form of
>> EBNF. As far as I know (but: syntax gurus, please correct me if I'm wrong)
>> EBNF has the serious problem that there is no single definition of it, so
>> the exact meaning has again to be guessed at. If I remember correctly this
>> is exactly the reason ABNF was created, to supersede EBNF.
>
> OK, so we should revert to using ABNF. We need to replace '/' with '|' or
> vice versa, I can't remember which is ABNF. I asked on multiple occasions if
> someone could check if the EBNF was OK, but no one did (until now).

We had a discussion - none of us thus far minded which one was used.

Jack, it seems EBNF is being used by ISO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form and
ABNF by IETF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form
, but I couldn't find the serious problem you are pointing out. EBNF
is also used to specify XML, so I don't really see anything wrong with
using it.


Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Tuesday, 23 February 2010 13:00:58 UTC