preserves/questions.md

title
Open questions

Q. Should "symbols" instead be URIs? Relative, usually; relative to what? Some domain-specific base URI?

No. They may be interpreted as URIs, of course; see here.

Q. Literal small integers: are they pulling their weight? They're not absolutely necessary. A. No, they have been removed (as part of the changes at version 0.990).

No. They were removed in the simplification of the syntax that was the outcome of issue 41.

Q. Should we go for trying to make the data ordering line up with the encoding ordering? We'd have to only use streaming forms, and avoid the small integer encoding, and not store record arities, and sort sets and dictionaries, and mask doubles (perhaps like this), and perhaps pick a specific NaN, and I don't know what to do about SignedIntegers. Perhaps make them more like floating-point formats, with the byte count acting as a kind of exponent underneath the sign bit.

• Perhaps define separate additional canonicalization restrictions? Doesn't help the ordering, but does help the equivalence.

• Canonicalization and early-bailout-equivalence-checking are in tension with support for streaming values.

Q. Should IOLists be wrapped in an identifying unary record constructor?

Q. Whitespace - is having , as whitespace sensible or not? I can think of arguments both ways. Similarly, JSON benefits from requiring a comma separating each item in a list; we currently don't require any whitespace at all between elements of a list, making it ambiguous: does [123] denote a single-element or a three-element list? Compare JSON where [1,2,3] is unambiguously different from [123].

With the addition of the notion of delimiters to the text syntax, we at least answer the question of how [123] parses: it must yield a single-element list.