Re: delimiters between tokens in turtle

On Thu, 2012-02-23 at 13:17 -0800, Gavin Carothers wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 11:31 AM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2012-02-23 at 18:01 +0100, Henry Story wrote:
> >> I can't quite work out what the delimiters between tokens are.
> >>
> >> The following seems to be correct N3 (cwm parses it)
> >>
> >>   @prefix : <>.
> >>   :me</knows>:her,:him.
> >>
> >> cwm even is able to parse
> >>
> >>    @prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1> .
> >>    :me foaf:knows:her.
> >
> > Ewwwww!  That's awful.  If the grammar really allows that then I
> > certainly hope the grammar will be changed to require whitespace between
> > tokens.
> 
> New data and new turtle writers should of course output whitespace,
> and I'm not aware of any that don't. I don't see a need however to
> demand that there be white space between tokens if they can be
> distinguished without the whitespace.

Sure, they *can* be distinguished.  But how easily?  And why should it
be allowed?  Aside from being able to use existing Turtle that exploits
this syntax I don't see any benefit in allowing it in the standard.
Turtle hasn't been standardized yet, and if I owned data that exploited
this syntax I'd want to fix that data anyway.  And I do see a down side,
both in simplifying parsers and simplifying human interpretation.



-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

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Received on Thursday, 23 February 2012 22:02:41 UTC