Please make sure the grammar is directly machine consumable.

This is a followup from a discussion between Yosi Scharf, implementer  
of SPARQL in cwm, currently on vacation,  and Eric P'dH, co-editor of  
the spec, several weeks ago.

Yosi has built his implementation of SPARQL from a file which is  
almost the one generated from the TR, but with a slight tweak to make  
the file grammar able to be parsed by a predictive parser [1] a  
simple form of LL(1) recursive descent parser.  I understood that the  
tweak was editorial in that the it didn't change the language, just  
the way it was expressed as a context-free grammar.

A situation in which code can be generated directly from the spec is  
a very strong position to be in.  I am not aware of any time this has  
previously happened for a W3C language, but I may be wrong.  As it is  
demonstrably simple to make the step here I would request it be done  
at last call stage before the call for implementation at CR.

[1] http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/cs2/LectureNotes/CS2Ah/ 
LangProc/lp10.pdf

Tim Berners-Lee
MIT/CSAIL/DIG

Received on Thursday, 18 August 2005 18:29:11 UTC