Hi folks,

I have taken another pass at the conversions material. Here are two documents that came from the document that was “Conversions”. The first is still called “Conversions” and focuses entirely on the semantics of conversions and how they are chosen. The second document contains all the material that could be considered “extensions” (so that’s what I called it J )

The intention here is to separate out the motivational issues. IMO we need the material in the first document in order to explain the operation of a DFDL parser. (I do not claim that this is the right material just that we need an explanation of how this works and this is a proposal to meet that need). The second document contains material that may be regarded differently in terms of implementation cost/benefit by different groups in the WG and we should discuss which bits make sense as required (for all implementations) and which might be optional.

I have included new examples in both documents, inspired by Steve’s suggestions.

I am aware that all of this material needs the details attending to. There are a number of design decisions that I made arbitrarily in order to get a document out to try to communicate the broad ideas. Assuming the ideas are adopted we will need to work through all the details of the syntax etc. Mike brought up a number of such issues in his response to the first draft of this stuff last week. I have not attempted to really answer these yet, I am still working at communicating the ideas to the group as a whole.

I did make some minor changes to the syntax largely to try to make the ideas clearer.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Martin