Re: questions about entities and entity declarations

> At 11:41 AM 9/24/96 CDT, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
> I think describing EE behavior in terms of an EE character is
> likely to be significantly simpler than describing it in terms of
> a non-character signal, particularly to programmers weaned on C's
> treatment of newline and EOF.  It may also simplify implementation.

Actually, for what it's worth, C does not have a end of file character.
The standard library (part of C now with ANSI C) makes the various I/O
functions return an out-of-band signal when tehre's no more data.
read() returns 0 bytes, getchar() returns 0xFFFFFFFF or -1 (doesn't fit
in a char, although ISO10646 might cause problems) and so on.  This is
exactly like End of Entity, as I understand the latter to be.


Eliot wrote:
> I see that I misunderstood the proposal. I thought you meant allowing
> hexidecimal numeric character references, not defining an entity set where
> the names happen to be hexadecimal equivalents. I think the latter is a
> darn good idea.  

Of course, without a #DEFAULT entity, you'd need an awful lot of entity
declarations.  In practice in XML, you'd create them on the fly.  But
what would an SGML system do?  I suppose an XML to SGML converter, if
such existed, could write an entities.sgml file containing declarations
for them all, or coudl convert them to decimal char refs.

Lee

Received on Tuesday, 24 September 1996 19:43:36 UTC