[XQuery] lexical leftovers 4

• From: Michael Dyck <jmdyck@ibiblio.org>
• Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 18:21:00 -0800
• To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
• Message-id: <402D860C.9FEBA13@ibiblio.org>

XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language
W3C Working Draft 12 November 2003
Here are some comments from
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2002Nov/0090.html
that did not receive a response from the WG.
It turns out that, in my recent submission:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004Feb/0193.html
I already re-stated many of the unanswered comments from the Nov 2002
posting. These two are the remainder.
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A.2.1 White Space Rules
"white space is needed to disambiguate the token"
    In my recent posting, I suggested changing "token" to "grammar".
    But I think I prefer what I said in Nov 2002:
        The phrase "disambiguate the token" is, I believe, a misuse of
        the concept of ambiguity. At any rate, I think it would be
        plainer and more accurate to say that whitespace is needed to
        prevent two adjacent tokens from being (mis-)recognized as one.
        For instance, consider the character-sequence
            a- b
        Note that there is a space before the 'b'. It thus has only one
        derivation from Module (the "a minus b" one), so there is no
        ambiguity involved, no disambiguation needed. Nevertheless, it
        is still a case in which (I assume) whitespace is needed between
        'a' and '-' to prevent the longest-match rule from
        (mis-)recognizing 'a-' as a QName.
"Special whitespace notation"
    Note that only the *notation* is special. The treatment of
    whitespace characters in "ws: explicit" and "ws: significant"
    productions is *not* special: they treat them like any other
    character, just as the XML spec does.  It's the *unmarked*
    productions that have special interpretation with respect to
    whitespace.
-Michael Dyck

Received on Friday, 13 February 2004 21:21:55 UTC