Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress wrote:
> Tony, addressing your first question:
>
> From: "Hammond, Tony" <>
>> 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
Copac http://copac.ac.uk A Mimas service funded by JISC
