At 5:12 PM 2/10/95, Brent Stilley wrote:
This substring thing is absolutely counter intuitive! A reasonable person
would consider the whole boundary to be an atomic token. Comparison of two
tokens necessarily involves considering the length of each - not substrings!
On the one hand, I agree that there seems to be no particular reason for
the substring restriction, except some mythical transport that adds
arbitrary amounts of whitespace after header lines. And, of course, the
fact that some things are hard to say in BNF. (I make a passing note that
the substring restriction itself is a rather interesting piece of 'BNF'.)
On the other hand, it *is* in the spec, it isn't hard to comply with, there
is no compelling need to change it, and there are evidently systems that
depend on the substring restriction. So I've moved my own disambiguation
to the beginning. No big deal.
--
Steve Dorner, Qualcomm Incorporated. "Oog make mission statement."