Re: [abnf-discuss] ABNF colloquialism for end-of-line

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

On 11/16/2017 1:26 PM, Sean Leonard wrote:
> To add some color to this point, “cuts” was discussed in the CBOR WG in the context of CDDL. It is a technique from Parsing Expression Grammars. Here is overview:
...
> Basically it commits the parser at a particular point, so that it does not backtrack.
> 
> However, PEGs are ordered; ABNF is unordered. With ABNF (as presently constituted), all alternatives in a choice are considered simultaneously (order is not relevant). Even if you match one alternative, you’re supposed to try all other alternatives.


(Disclaimer:  What follows is pure personal opinion.)


I'll offer this for consideration, without also offering any specific 
action...

Why did ABNF become popular?

(For a time, RFC 733 and then RFC 822 were the most-cited RFCs.  It 
turned out this was not due to the email portion but folk were re-using 
the ABNF meta-specification, which is why the later, revision effort to 
RFC 822 split the ABNF text out into its own RFC.)

At the time ABNF was defined in the latter 1970s, most specs provided 
their own variation of BNF.  Everyone wanted tailoring to the basic 
tool.  But while folk have often wanted to enhance ABNF, over the years, 
the 'let's define a new variant' tendency mostly died out -- ignoring 
the much more recent move towards JSON...  Why did this popularity happen?

Languages need to balance expressive power against human usage 
complexity.  Enough but not too much, of each.  ABNF seemed to strike a 
good balance.  (I like to think the documentation clarity in RFC 733 
also helped, but then I'm quite biased about this, given how much effort 
I put into that aspect of the work...)

I think the biggest danger in creating a meta-language is specification 
obscurity.  The tendency to want to add features can too-easily create 
too much complexity for easy human comprehension.  The result is that 
seemingly-simple specifications can too-easily have implications that 
are not understood by most readers.

Computers are not the target audience for computer languages.  Human 
readers are.  Subtle effects (nevermind side-effects) are very easily 
missed by human readers.

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net