- From: Michael Kay <mhk@mhk.me.uk>
- Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 10:12:56 +0100
- To: "'Xavier Franc'" <xfranc@online.fr>, <www-ql@w3.org>
> > Some personal remarks about the semicolon separator between > declarations: > > - it has been added silently in November (not listed in change list) > that's not nice for implementers... > > - I have never understood the necessity of this change. > Is there some subtle lexical issue that I dont see ? The syntax can be parsed without it, but it's very hard to produce decent error messages and to recover from syntax errors without it. > > actually this separator is optional in my own implementation > and I never noticed any parsing problem. > > - I agree with Jason that making parser writing easier > is not a good justification for such a change. But allowing better error messages and error recovery is a good justification. The XQuery syntax is very fragile from this point of view (because of the lack of redundancy), and the semicolon adds much-needed robustness. Michael Kay
Received on Thursday, 22 April 2004 05:16:43 UTC