On 5/16/25 8:45 AM, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote:
An additional reason why I think that English sentences are better than ABNF or
any other formalism as the normative part of a standard track RFC: most people
understand what an English sentence means,
Most people *in the world* don't understand ABNF.
If we restrict the population to those people who can understand and
wish to implement an RFC, then most probably understand both.
Even among that population, while many with think they understand the
English, among them there will be many *different* understandings.
(Consider the Bible. People have been trying to understand it for
thousands of years. Many people consider it normative. Yet there are
lots of non-interoperable implementations.)
and there are plenty of safeguards along the standardization process to make
sure that they are correct. This is not, in my experience, the case with
formal languages (or examples for that matter, my other pet peeve), and
verification tools do not help much past the syntax. Everything I wrote at the
IETF these last 10 years was about solving these two issues, so I am not going
to repeat that here.
A standard needs to specify more than just syntax. But syntax is still
an important part. The fact that ABNF only covers the syntax is not a
good reason to abandon it for that part.
Thanks,
Paul
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