From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Feb 17 2003 - 08:58:32 CST
In <3E5014F6.5010800@Sonietta.blilly.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>J.B. Moreno wrote:
>> Indicating future directions is IMO fairly useless unless you are also
>> /starting/ down that path -- which means generation as well as acceptance.
>Consider RFC 2822. It introduced parse-only rules for recognizing
>unquoted dot in a phrase, e.g.
> From: J.B. Moreno <planb@newsreaders.com>
>instead of the standards-compliant
> From: "J.B. Moreno" <planb@newsreaders.com>
>Unquoted dot has to date been illegal in a phrase, as
>the dot is a special. But by first requiring recognition
>while still prohibiting generation, the way is being
>prepared to legalize that contruct. Generating now
>would be a mistake as many parsers are not yet prepared
>to accept what has always been an illegal construct.
Now that is an interesting feature of RFC 2822 that I had not spotted
before. Why on earth did they hide it away under the heading "Miscellaneous
obsolete tokens" if what they meant was "New feature; Must Accept, SHOULD
NOT generate"?
And if that is the case, do we want to introduce it into Usefor on the
same terms?
-- 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: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk 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