Per my last message, the work that Markus and I did this weekend to analyze Joseph's proposal about using the empty address to represent the outer root took us down the path of exploring its impact on dictionary syntax. Although in the end it did not result in any changes, it did give us experience with using the new + dictionary syntax proposal.
What we both noticed is that using requiring an extra layer of context for all dictionary entries seems to add more confusion and complexity than it solves.
That forced us back into once again looking at some form of bracketing syntax, even though we have run out of bracketing characters.
So we revisited Markus' proposal to use a pipe, |, as the dictionary bracketing syntax.
After working with it for an hour yesterday, I was very pleased. Even though a pipe character is not a left/right bracket syntax, when used that way it reads almost as cleanly as parentheses, square brackets, or curly brackets. For example:
|<+name>|/$is+/$string+
|<+name>|/$is()/|<+first>|
But by far the biggest advantage is that by using pipe as a bracket, dictionary syntax will work the same way as all the other bracket syntax we have defined (root, collection, attribute, variable).
So
I am withdrawing my previous proposal to use the + context for dictionary syntax, and replacing it with a proposal to use pipe as the dictionary bracket syntax. Note that I have updated
https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/GraphModelStructure to reflect this.
Thoughts?
=Drummond