Re: Comment: don't use ? and $. Pick one. [OK?]

On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 18:56 -0500, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> If there's a justification for using both $ and ? to represent 
> variables, I haven't found it yet.

The WG made that choice in the course of resolving the
punctuationSyntax issue.
 http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/DataAccess/issues#punctuationSyntax

A number of design considerations were laid out in:
Draft: open issues around '?' use.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2004OctDec/0160


>  I haven't finished reading the spec 
> yet, so I could be missing it; but just looking at the BNF, I don't 
> think there's any significant difference.

Indeed, there is none.

> If this is true, then I strongly urge the working group to pick one. 
> personally I prefer the dollar sign. It's not a reserved character in 
> URLs and it's already used to indicate variables in other languages such 
> as PHP. However this isn't a strong preference. I could certainly live 
> with a question mark.
> 
> However I feel having too makes the language pointlessly complex, much 
> harder to read, and harder to learn. It increases the size of the spec, 
> increases the size and complexity of the grammar, and reserves an extra 
> character that must now be avoided. Please pick one or the other. Flip a 
> coin if you have to, but please don't use both.

We did try to pick one, but only found consensus in allowing both.

At this point in the process, I would need considerably more information
in order to ask the WG to re-consider this aspec of the design. I'm
pretty sure we discussed those considerations.

> Please treat this as an official last call comment and file a resolution 
> in disposition of last call comments. Thank you.

We dispose of last call comments in email like this one.
Please let us know whether you're satisfied with this response.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Monday, 6 March 2006 04:11:14 UTC