[SCL] Re: SCL syntax

[Murray Altheim]

Mark Stickel wrote:
[...]
> As Lisp does, and unlike previous versions of SCL syntax,
> tokens like "123ABC" are now legal namesequences.  I'm okay with
> this (and it is general), but some may prefer that
> namesequences not start with digits.

The syntax for token definition should perhaps be influenced
by the potential for transformation into other syntax variants.
So while SCL might allow "@x" or "123ABC" as a token, neither
of these would be allowed values as XML Names, which must begin
with an alpha character. Now, XML Names are a restricted class
of tokens within XML, but using them means that a lot of existing
machinery comes available (such as the uniqueness of the ID
namespace within XML which allows HTML/XHTML link anchors to
function).

I'm not saying that all concrete syntaxes of SCL must comply with
the XML Name constraint, but there would be distinct benefits if
they did.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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