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Date: Tue, 28 May 2013 10:57:46 -0400
From: Paul Kyzivat <pkyzivat@alum.mit.edu>
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Subject: Re: [abnf-discuss] Web service to convert ABNF to RELAX NG-like XML
 format
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On 5/28/13 9:20 AM, Riccardo Bernardini wrote:
> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Paul Kyzivat <pkyzivat@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>> Why would you want to do this???
>
> Why not?

Because the ABNF is more concise and readable.
And it is formally defined so that it is easily parsed.

> Seriously, I can see a case where this could be useful: if
> you want to write some software that takes as input an ABNF grammar, I
> think it is easier to parse the XML (mainly because there are
> libraries ready off-the-shelf to do this) than the raw ABNF.  I agree
> that the procedure would turn out a bit convoluted....

Yes, you can consider the XML form to be a parse tree for the ABNF.
And if you have xml-based tools that let you do useful things with it, 
then fine.

There seem to be different schools of thought about the purpose of xml. 
IMO it is a machine representation - intended for processing by 
computers. IMO it ought to be *generated* by computers too.

But some people seem to consider it a representation for people. IMO, 
while it more suitable for people than a binary representation would be, 
it is still a very poor one for people.

	Thanks,
	Paul

>> On 5/27/13 6:35 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>     My http://search.cpan.org/dist/Parse-ABNF/ comes with a demo tool that
>>> converts ABNF grammars into an undocumented RELAX NG-like XML format, a
>>> rule like `a = b / c d` would come out as
>>>
>>>     <define name="a">
>>>       <choice>
>>>         <ref name="b"></ref>
>>>         <group>
>>>           <ref name="c"></ref>
>>>           <ref name="d"></ref>
>>>         </group>
>>>       </choice>
>>>     </define>
>>>
>>> At http://www.websitedev.de/abnf/abnf2xml/ is a CGI wrapper around the
>>> code. I tested it with the http://tools.ietf.org/abnf/ output for RFC
>>> 3987 (IRI) and RFC 4627 (JSON) and it seems to work well enough.
>>>
>>> regards,
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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