Agenda for this week:

Discussion - we've concluded going through Simon Parker's comments on the DFDL 019 draft.  Via some last emails.

This week we can start on these 3 topics which are ready for discussion:

• - simplifying opaque types - proposal circulated
• - simplifying length properties - proposal circulated
• - require wiki discussion - need to draw resolved conclusions from this. (We're very close.)

This one there's been no wiki discussion yet, and there's a competing (and even simpler) proposal in preparation too, so this one's not ready for time on a call yet.

• - defaults/nulls/optionals simplification - wiki discussion, also proposal in preparation

News/Progress:

A new draft (023 or higher by when it is circulated) is in preparation that folds in most of the recent clarifications and discussion, and also reorganizes things substantially.
Highlights of this reorg's principles:

1) the "semantics" parse function stuff should go to a section in the back. It's really for implementors to make very clear how scope/context works, how variable memory works, and how expression evaluation works.

2) user-level documentation of the semantics should be based on a quasi "grammar" for DFDL-describable data and be focused on how the properties affect the interpretation of the data as explained by this grammar

3) markup/delimiters are explained by recursively using DFDL to describe them (like the "require" wiki forum page advocates)

4) speculative parsing really simplifies things a great deal. Leverage this to the max.


Other Notes:

MikeB will be unable to make the 2007-08-22 weekly call. (on vacation)