I think I can argue for why it has to be the more verbose "documentFinalTerminatorCanBeMissing".
First let me discuss why we're stuck with "document" generally. I would also rather these "documents" were just called "items" or similar less-committal noun, but we are stuck with this formal use of the term "document" from XML, XML Schema, etc. I have heard people use the term "data document" to clarify that a chunk of XML is formally a document according to the XML well-formedness rules and such, but distinguishing that it's not a human document like someone would read or write, but rather is just a chunk of data. E.g., when you use SOAP over HTTP protocol, which is a remote procedure call mechanism, you pass an XML data document from the caller to the called context. DFDL uses document in this sense. We mean data document because that's the way we're using XML and XML Schema. If you are parsing messages from a stream, then one parse call returns one message as an XML data document. The second comment you made is about use of "documentFinal..." versus just "final....". That is intentionally verbose because this property doesn't apply in any relative sense of "final" but only the outermost document scope sense of final. This leaves us free to use the undecorated word "final" in a looser sense. E.g., we can discuss the final term in a sequence, or the final character of an element's representation. Those are relative uses of the term "final" to the thing I'm talking about. It's a synonym for "last". When we really want to talk about the ultimate end of things, then "document final" is the way you do that. Interestingly, if we were going to shorten the name, I claim "documentTerminatorCanBeMissing" is more appropriate, because a terminator is already final in a relative sense and a document can have only one terminator in the data stream, so the word "final" is redundant. ________________________________ From: Costello, Roger L. <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, February 4, 2020 2:45 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: I recommend "document" be removed in the property documentFinalTerminatorCanBeMissing Hi Folks, The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "document" this way: Document: a computer file containing information input by a computer user and usually created with an application (such as a spreadsheet or word processor) Not all things processed by Daffodil are documents (computer files). For instance, Daffodil can process streams, which are not documents. To be more inclusive, property names should not contain the word "document" I recommend changing documentFinalTerminatorCanBeMissing to finalTerminatorCanBeMissing /Roger
