Re: Mailing List Last Call for 2822 update internet-draft

[Resending with my actual subscribed address so that this gets through in 
a timely fashion.  My apologies to all.  And yes, I've re-added the pine 
rule to do this automatically that I lost when my laptop died...]


On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, Paul Overell wrote:
> In message <[email protected]>, Alan Barrett 
> <[email protected]> writes
>> 
>> On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, Alan Barrett wrote:
>>> > It sure was. Comments and folding white space were allowed between
>>> > any two tokens in RFC 822. And since the syntax for zone was:
>>> >
>>> >                         ("+" / "-") 4DIGIT
>>> >
>>> > a comment was allowed between those two. I don't know how to read
>>> > 3.1.4 and 3.4.3 in RFC 822 and not come up with that interpretation.
>>> 
>>> Yes, you are correct.
>> 
>> Hang on...  "+" and "-" are not in the list of special characters that
>> RFC822 section 3.1.4 says are used to delimit tokens.
> 
> No, but quote marks are in the list of specials, "+" and "-" are 
> quoted-strings.

The quote marks around the plus and minus signs are part of the 822-BNF syntax 
and do not make those the quoted-strings referred to by RFC 822 section 3.1.4.

(If that isn't true, then someone needs to explain domain-literal, as its 
definition starts with "[", but it's described in section 3.1.4 as a lexical 
symbol distinct from quoted-string.)


>> So I would say
>> that, given input like "+0000", the sign and the digits together make
>> up an "atom" per the description in section 3.1.4 and the grammar in
>> section 3.3.  The ( ("+" / "-") 4DIGIT ) production in the grammar in
>> section 5.1 is looking inside a single token, not looking at two tokens.

I agree.


> Disagree, a quoted-string is a token

Please identify the quoted-strings in this example Date header field from the 
RFC:
 	Date:     26 Aug 76 1430 EDT



So, I disagree with Pete and Paul and instead agree with Alan that RFC 822 did 
not permit comments or folding whitespace between the sign and the number of a 
numeric zone.


Philip Guenther