Date: Mon, 28 Apr 1997 10:46:36 -0400
From: mueller@inf.ethz.ch (Martin =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=FCller?= )
Subject: Re: RE and Date formats

>
>I'm still not sure what to do about illegal date/result fields.
>Anders & David suggest to leave them where they are.
>(maybe the application should at least notify the user that these
>values are incorrect [only if he/she edits those fields - otherwise
>such a message would be too annoying]).
>Other opnions?
>
>

We have had the problem of illegal entries in the past, and it will not
simply go away with the new standard I'm afraid. The best we can do is to
persuade authors to write clean files in the future, and to offer help with
the conversion of old unclean files.

The first point can be facilitated by offering rigorous test suites, or
even a reference implementation.

Concerning conversion, I think Arno's tool is a big step in the right
direction. Still the question is what to do with illegal properties?
I think we might leave them as they are and just ignore them if they are
illegal format and cannot be parsed. So they could be read in and written
out without being changed.

A conversion tool could be called separately from the SGF editor. It would
attempt to recognize and modify such entries. Maybe it would be an
interactive tool that asks the user what to do in hard cases.

Compiled versions of such a tool for PC and Mac should be available on the
net once. As an experiment, I have compiled Arno's text-based version on
the Mac a couple of weeks ago. It was easy to get it running. Any
volunteers for building a nice interface around it?

Maybe other programs could even call such a tool on the fly to convert files?

        Martin