Re: [search-ws] CQL Parsing Questions

["Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress" <rden@loc.gov>]

Currently:
search-clause-group     =     search-clause-group    Boolean-modified 
subquery  |   subquery
subquery    =      "(" query ")"  /    search-clause


Why can't these two be replaced by:

search-clause-group     =

"("search-clause-group")"  |    search-clause   |  search-clause-group 
Boolean-modified  search-clause

Or for better readability:

search-clause-group     =  quoted-search-clause-group | 
unquoted-search-clause-group
quoted-search-clause-group  = "("search-clause-group")"
unquoted-search-clause-group =  search-clause   |  search-clause-group 
Boolean-modified  search-clause


--Ray

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ashley Sanders" <a.sanders@manchester.ac.uk>
To: "Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress" <rden@loc.gov>
Cc: "Hammond, Tony" <t.hammond@nature.com>; <search-ws@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2009 7:43 AM
Subject: Re: [search-ws] CQL Parsing Questions


> Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress wrote:
>> Tony, addressing your first question:
>>
>> From: "Hammond, Tony" <t.hammond@nature.com>
>>>        title=(author=kernighan)
>>> is equivalent to
>>>        author=kernighan
>>> "
>>>
>>> and following up with him he claimed this was cooked into the BNF
>>
>> Well first take a look at this thread and see if it helps put this into 
>> some perspective.
>> http://listserv.loc.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0603&L=srw-ed&D=0&T=0&X=2C676213DF8F2521EB&P=1982 
>> This is a convoluted mess that is better ignored.  The grammar has a hole 
>> that lead to nonsensical queries and I think that the consensus was that 
>> it is harder to fix the grammar than to just say that queries like these 
>> are nonsensical.
>
> One can't feeling that if the grammer allows that, then the grammer is 
> broken and should be fixed.
>
>> The real issue was a query like  "title=(A or B)".    Is it a shorthand 
>> for - "title=A or title=B".
>
> That also looks like an horrendous piece of syntax to me. I can't think of 
> any other language that allows you to specify queries like that. 
> Admittedly it is often what people want to do when they first come
> across boolean statements, but I really don't think we shouldn't let
> them. Especially if it results in a nonsensical mess like
> title=(author=xxxx)).
>
> Do people feel that cql is intended for users or machines? My feeling
> is that it should be for machine-to-machine communication and therefore
> doesn't need any syntactic sugar.
>
> Ashley.
> -- 
> Ashley Sanders               a.sanders@manchester.ac.uk
> Copac http://copac.ac.uk A Mimas service funded by JISC
>
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