new Library Infrastructure spec.

[Keith Wansbrough]

> I think SimonM's suggestion of an RFC2822-like syntax is reasonable, but it 

[my suggestion, not SimonM's!]

> would probably be better to not simply cite RFC2822, since some 

I agree, we should give an explicit definition.  I don't think it's 
likely to be very complicated.

> complications might arise.  An alternative might be XML, which would be a 
> more "modern" choice.

Ugh! No! Please! No!  No reason to do this - remember, this file is 
written by Angela Author, who has just written a Haskell module or two, 
and doesn't have a handly XML structured editor to hand.  She just 
wants to fire up her text editor and write three lines.

> Some nits to look out for with RFC2822 format are:
> + Internationalization and non-ASCII characters

We should specify either Latin-1 or Unicode/UTF-8.  The latter, I guess.

> + Case (in)sensitivity of header field names

Insensitive would follow the Principle of Least Surprise.

> + No support for structured information (text string values only).
> + No facility for grouping information
> + Comments in some header field values

I was imagining that the text string would almost always be a Haskell
value, using the Haskell lexer and a Haskell-related parser.  This
would give us comments and structure.

> + Extensibility model

Yes, this should be specified.  The document already implies "ignore
headers you don't understand", which is good.

> I think it would be good to include a commenting convention.  (Use Haskell 
> conventions -- and {- ... -} ?)

See above.

> Keep up the good work!

:-)



Try this, using the Haskell Report grammar syntax, and Section 2.2 of
the Haskell Report for the definitions of <lexeme>, <newline>, and
<whitespace>:


<description> ::= { <descline> }

<descline> ::= <fieldname> : { <lexeme> | <foldedwhitespace> } <newline>

<foldedwhitespace> ::= <whitespace> | <newline> <whitespace>


with the proviso that any <newline> in <foldedwhitespace> has no
semantic significance.

Alternatively, we could provide Haskell code as specification here.


--KW 8-)