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Interdoc Agenda 24 September 1981

Page Numbers: Yes X: 527 Y: 10.5"

Arbitrary Choices

ToParticipantsDate24 September 1981

FromJim Mitchell, Jim HorningLocationPalo Alto

SubjectArbitrary Choices in InterdocOrganizationCSL

XEROX

"One of the primary purposes of a standard
is to be definitive about otherwise arbitrary choices."

There are many places in the Interdoc proposal where we have made an arbitrary choice for definiteness. It will be important that the ultimate standard make some choice on these points; it matters little whether it is the same as ours. To forestall profitless debate on these points, we have tried to list some of the choices that we believe can be easily changed at a later date:

Encoding choices:

The choice of representations for literals (we generally followed Interpress here).

The selection of particular characters for particular kinds of bracketting, and for particular operators.

The choice of infix and functional notation for the interchange encoding (as opposed, e.g., to Polish postfix).

The choice of particular identifiers for basic concepts.

Linguistic choices:

The choice of a particular set of basic operators for the language.

The particular set of primitive data types (we followed Interpress—its set seems about as small as will suffice).

The choice of particular syntactic sugars for common linguistic forms.