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From: roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank
Subject: Re: new feature table format
Message-ID: <1990Aug13.191317.17744@phri.nyu.edu>
Date: 13 Aug 90 19:13:17 GMT
References: <9008131447.AA00221@domain.lanl.gov>
Sender: news@phri.nyu.edu (News System)
Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City
Lines: 36


	First, some administrativia.  A few people responded to my feeler
for a mailing list to discuss parsing feature tables.  It has been
suggested that rather than form a new (private) discussion group, we just
use the existing channels, namely bionet.molbio.genbank, in all of its
various incarnations.  I can't see any down side to that idea, so that's
exactly what I'm going to do.  Should that turn out to be unworkable, the
mailing list idea can be resurected, but for now this seems a lot simplier.

michael%domain@LANL.GOV (Michael J. Cinkosky) writes:
> Dan also suggests indenting lines on which qualifiers are continued from
> the previous line differently than lines on which qualifiers begin. [...]
> The grammer that was selected is "token-oriented", not "line-oriented".
> While writing a token-oriented parser is different from writing a
> line-oriented parser, it is not significantly more difficult.

	Perhaps there is a middle ground?  Requiring the use of special
indentation as a machine parsing aid is silly, since there is already a
perfectly good parsing mechanism available (the BNF).  On the other hand, it
might make it easier for humans to scan the files by eye.  I don't see how
the extra indentation would get in the way of machine parsing, so why not
use it?

	Dan, I got your Bison grammer and am trying to figure out what might
be wrong.  I don't use Bison, and don't consider myself a Yacc guru either,
so I don't know how much luck I'll have.  I just got the Feature Table
Definition from EMBL (contrary to the MS Word documentation, you can't print
linked files back-to-front!  Grrrr...) but havn't digested it yet.  BTW, I
put it on our anonymous ftp server (goober.phri.nyu.edu, 128.122.136.10,
filename ~ftp/pub/seq/FeatureTable.msw.sit.hqx) to make it easier for people
on this side of the Atlantic to get at it.
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane?  Did you say arcane?  It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"