On 01/05/2013 13:46, Tobias Conradi wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 2:24 PM, <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2013, at 8:08, Tobias Conradi wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 1:35 PM, <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
Tokens in the timezone files are separated by _any whitespace_. I don't see the word "token" in ftp://ftp.iana.org/tz/code/Theory
It's the plain english meaning of the word. http://www.wordreference.com/definition/token lists seven English meanings.
Okay, so it's the common meaning of the word when talking about parsers.
Any whitespace is the separation in the format that zic accepts (as evidenced by the fact that these lines don't, in fact, break anything), I have no idea why people are trying to impose a tab-separated format on it, And because you do not have any idea why, you reject it?
One reason for rejecting it is that it is already documented that the fields on a line are separated by any number of white space characters.
particularly when they don't have a consistent _number_ of tabs regardless (in northamerica alone, there are 455 lines that begin with a tab, 9 that have extra tabs at the end, and 7 that have two tabs between two fields). The variable number - I don't know whether it is not consistent - was a topic on the list before, e.g. for zone.tab:
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2012-March/017507.html
I don't know about benefits of having a variable number, but if there is none, it is a benefit to have a constant number, e.g. for opening files in OpenOffice.
One benefit is that it allows you to line things up neatly, at least if diplayed monospace with tab-stops every 8 character columns as the Unix god intended. -- -=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd. E-mail: <abbotti@mev.co.uk> )=- -=( Tel: +44 (0)161 477 1898 FAX: +44 (0)161 718 3587 )=-