Re: On ABNF in 5322: Advice needed

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pete Resnick <presnick@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.

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