davecb@yunexus.UUCP (David Collier-Brown) (01/02/90)
brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: >What would be really useful would be to define an extensible .newsrc format, >just as the header format is extensible. Strong agreement! And its not **totally** impossible to fix all the newsreaders in the world if the fix is trivial enough. The classical one is to change the parser so that 1) there is a comment convention, and 2) unrecognized lines are parsed and ignored. This tends to look like (in the interpreter, or in an ad-hoc reader/parser/interpreter) switch (first_token) { case SHARPSIGN: /* Its a comment. */ continue; [...] default: /* It MAY be an error... */ remember_to_warn_about(UNKNOWN_HEADER); continue; } >Perhaps something simple like: >groupname[:!] [fieldname=data;]* This is even better in one sense, as some current parsers won't even notice the data is there! (Its weaker in another, in that there is the requirement that the null-named field comes first. Maybe groupname[!:] [traditional_data] [fieldname=data;]* with an escape convention for quoting the separators (';'s). --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | davecb@yunexus, ...!yunexus!davecb or 72 Abitibi Ave., | {toronto area...}lethe!dave Willowdale, Ontario, | Joyce C-B: CANADA. 416-223-8968 | He's so smart he's dumb.