Re: On ABNF in 5322: Advice needed

Pete Resnick <[email protected]> wrote

>The suggestion was made (and it's been made by others) that all ABNF 
>terminals should be surrounded with angle brackets, so it's easy to 
>distinguish "a phrase" from "<phrase>" and "a quoted string" from 
>"<quoted-string>". My argument against doing this has always been (1) 
>there are very few places in the text where it is ambiguous, and none 
>(AFAIK) where it makes a difference; and (2) going through and making 
>the change could result in errors. (It's a lot of occurrences to go 
>through.) Advice sought:

+1

It makes reading such documents much easier. We went through all the
USEFOR drafts a long time ago to put them into that format. It takes some
effort, but IMHO it is worth it.

>If you choose (B), I'd also like to hear your answer to the question: 
>Does this require cycling back through the IESG or (*gasp*) another 
>IETF last call?

I would hope not. But it sounds as if the RFC Editor is willing to play
without that.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: [email protected]      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5