On 2013-09-05 18:24, Paul Eggert wrote:
Ian Abbott wrote:
I guess such =zone references should refer to a zone earlier in the same file to keep things simple
But order is not supposed to matter in zic input. The man page says "Except for continuation lines, lines may appear in any order in the input." It's probably better to continue in that tradition, even if it's a bit harder to implement.
I think it'd be OK if the new "extended" file is not treated as if it could be compiled by itself. I've often chafed at the current approach, where we for example need to copy rules from other files into "antarctica"; I'd rather avoid copies in the data, as they're harder to maintain.
Rather than extending the current zic format, would it make more sense to have a preprocessor that produces files that can be fed to zic or to third-party "zic file" parsers? The preprocessor could pull in rules that are shared between files, for example. It could even do the winnowing of data that has been talked about. -- -=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd. E-mail: <abbotti@mev.co.uk> )=- -=( Tel: +44 (0)161 477 1898 FAX: +44 (0)161 718 3587 )=-