Re: sbnf (striped BNF)

> 
> kifer@cs.sunysb.edu (Michael Kifer) writes:
> > Why do you think that this move has not been well-received? 
> 
> Because the only public comment I got was from Harold and it was still
> advocating top-down (ASN-first) design.  I got one very negative private
> comment (also strongly advocating top-down ASN-first design).

I did not understand Harold's comment this way. It seems to me that he just
wanted to slightly modify your new proposal.

> > For instance, I
> > did not respond, but I always thought that BNF is the way to
> > go. 
> 
> Yes, but that doesn't mean you support SBNF.  I can't really tell.

I think this is definitely an improvement over the previous ASN attempts.


> > Introducing new notation and doing research on it as we go does not
> > look like what we should be doing.
> 
> If there were something off-the-shelf that would solve our problems,

What are our problems exactly? BNF was fine for over 40 years and I cannot
understand why it is no longer adequate all of a sudden.

> that would be great.  Maybe there is, but no one seems able to lead us
> to it and help us with it.  I'm doing the best I can in the absense of
> other options.
> 
> > > In any case, I think I'd want machine-readable data in each dialect
> > > definition which told my software which collections were ordered and
> > > which were unordered.
> > 
> > f(a->b,c->d) is not a collection. It is a term. Do you also want to be able
> > to express in the syntax that p/\q == q/\p?
> > What about p/\(q\/r) == p/\q \/ p/\r?
> >
> > It beats me why do you want to capture some part of the semantics in the
> > definition of the syntax.
> 
> I don't think we're going to get anywhere with this discussion.

We could get to a resolution, if you could explain which problems you are
trying to solve. It seems that you think that I am pulling your leg, but in
reality I am honestly trying to understand what the problem is.

> It makes perfect sense to me that we'd think of the rules in a ruleset
> as being in an unordered collection and the arguments in an argument
> list being in an ordered collection.  I understand the semantics will be
> expressed against the presentaiton syntax, and that's fine, but I think
> at least some of us implementing translators will have a much easier
> time thinking at the data-model level.

I really doubt that embedding this piece of semantic into syntax is going
to help anybody implement anything. At least, this was not my experience.


	--michael  


>      -- Sandro
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 6 September 2007 04:25:01 UTC