Meeting minutes
Accept the minutes of the previous meeting
[Approved]
Review of open actions
2025-10-14-a NW to add a link to Steven’s modularization paper to the list of papers
Completed
2025-10-14-b NW to summarize the design decisions that differ from SP's paper.
Completed
2025-10-14-c NW to update the README in the samples to make them CC0 explicitly.
Completed
2025-10-14-d SP to reply to Alain.
Completed
2025-10-14-e NW to fix the iXML grammar link in the GitHub README.
Completed
Status reports
Norm: Modularity implemented
Steven: Oh yes, I need to comment on your email
Fredrik: I can automatically download a grammar from the command line
… using an ixml: prefix
Norm: I believe my implementation recognises http: as a prefix for downloading grammars
Fredrik: I am also writing a YAML parser in ixml
… there is lots of data in YAML, but don't like the format of YAML, so I want to read the YAML grammars in a different way.
New open issues
#310 Not possible to set priority on rules
Steven: I admit I misunderstood what was being said.
Steven: I now understand it to be part of a larger issue about dealing with ambiguity
… I think there's a higher-level issue "Dealing with ambiguity", including subtraction and negation.
Bethan: I don't think subtraction is about ambiguity, but expressing new things.
John: I use it to disambiguate
… such as keywords.
Bethan: But it allows you to specify things that aren't otherwise possible.
John: this is one of the places where pragmatics says in order to reduce ambiguity, I have two routes, set theory, or new rules.
Fredrik: I agree with John
Bethan: One big difference that makes me feel they are different, are two use cases
Norm: I characterise the distinction is that one changes how the parser works, the other determines how the serialisation is done
Fredrik: I don't think subtraction can be done by a larger grammar
Bethan: I think most cases of subtraction can be represented in a grammar
Norm: It would be useful to see examples
Steven: I do think we need to do comparisons of the different methods
Norm: I will add a new top-level discussion item
ACTION: Norm to create new higher-level issue for ambiguity
ACTION: Norm to add Symposium to every agenda
#309 Feature request: Doubled "--" to disable the "-" suppressor marker … for faster iteration
Norm: I didn't understand what was being asked for
Steven: I didn't see what the win would be
John: I have a flag that says 'ignore marks' so that you get the whole parse.
<norm> Norm: I have a similar flag.
John: a simpler technique, rather than '--', use "^", which is rarely used.
Steven: Good point
Bethan: Or use a comment.
Steven: So resolved not to accept
ACTION: Steven to reply to "--" issue
#308 Not possible to specify an exact number of repetitions
Steven: I don't feel there is a sufficient number of use cases
Bethan: I think this is good
Norm: I have sympathy for this.
Bethan: This is just syntactic sugar
John: It might be expensive for 8-22
Steven: We need proposals for syntax then
… and implementation rules
John: The rewrites take us from + and * to recursion; for multiples we will end up with a large set of rules.
… I think it is much deeper to handle number of repetitions.
Nico: And how about repetions with separators?
Steven: We should be consistent
John: With exact numbers you can use a logarithmic approach. With ranges, it is harder.
Nico: It would be a way to specify IPv6 addresses
#322 Extend Unicode version test to cover Unicode 16 and 17
This isn’t an issue, it’s a pull request from Gunther Rademacher
Norm: It is added tests for new versions of Unicode
Next meeting
Norm: Regrets, but please meet without me.
Nov 25th
Symposium
Norm: We already have two proposals.
Bethan: Push on Slack!
John: Meeting+1 is 9th December
Norm: Let's do symposium business on 16th