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References: Your message of "Thu, 04 Feb 1999 15:36:06 GMT."            
 <F6MzC6.DJz@clw.cs.man.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 16:07:37 -0600
To: DRUMS <drums@cs.utk.edu>
From: Pete Resnick <presnick@qualcomm.com>
Subject: Atoms and phrases (Was: UTF-8 in headers)

I have Bcc'ed this message to ietf-822@imc.org since this discussion 
originated there, but have directed the discussion to DRUMS, since 
this is a DRUMS issue. Please direct future followup on this subtopic 
to the DRUMS list.

On 2/4/99 at 2:23 PM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:

>> I think not. I was working from the syntax in DRUMS (admittedly my 
>> version was dated March 1998, so it may be different now). The 
>> syntax I have gives:
>>
>> atom = [CFWS] 1*atext [CFWS]
>>
>> so "foo" and "bar" are atoms (the CFWS is optional).
>
> This probably points to a need for a clarification in DRUMS -
> an atom is intended to be the entire contiguous sequence of
> atext.
>> so "foobar" is a phrase consisting of two words side-by-side, as 
>> allowed by the syntax. It can also be legitimately parsed in many 
>> other ways, of course.
>
> this may be allowed by the grammar, but was not intended.

It was not intended. Back in draft -05, there was a sentence in the 
syntax discussion of the atom definition that said "Two atoms have to 
be separated by some other token, since putting two atoms next to 
each other would create a single atom." It was pointed out to me that 
this was incorrect, since the atom token itself includes the optional 
CFWS, so I removed the sentence. However, in the semantics 
description of atom, it says: "Semantically, the optional comments 
and FWS surrounding the rest of the characters are not part of the 
token; the token is only the run of atext characters in an atom..."

If further clarification is needed in the atom definition, or in the 
definition of phrase, to disambiguate, I'm open for suggestions.

pr
--
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick@qualcomm.com>
Eudora Engineering - QUALCOMM Incorporated
Ph: (217)337-6377 or (619)651-4478, Fax: (619)651-1102