Wed 2002-11-06 18:43, Jasen Betts (3:640/531.42) wrote to andrew clarke:

 >>> While we're at it, can we standardise the Flags formatting too
 >>> (FTS-5001)?  Eg. rather than Txx T:xx, making it simpler to
 >>> parse them generically.

 ac>> I couldn't find any ",T:" in my nodelist, so I think that's a 
 ac>> non-issue, unless I've misunderstood

 > He's pushing to separate the data part from the identifier part.

 > The way we have it there's over 2000 different Txy type flags possible

 > by putting the colon in in the new format there's one T: that has a 2
 > character data field after it.

 > otherwise you make T a special case when parsing the nodelist and 
 > speaciual cases are yucky and tend to cause problems in the future,

If the nodelist flag begins in T and contains non-alphabetic characters or
isn't 3 characters long then it must be something else - right?  But if
isn't "something else", then all you need is a simple lookup
table.

 > personally I'd prefer to replace the Txy flag with TIME:xy or similar
 > conversion software (to produce FTS5 nodelists) should be able to to 
 > that conversion.

I don't think you can, because FTS-5001 has made it a standard.  And you
can't change standards, only add to them.  With the only red herring being
that the standard has "expired", but that shouldn't change
people's attitude towards it, because (presumably) software was written to
the standard when it applied.

-- mail{at}ozzmosis.com

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