Re: Citation syntax: Underscore MUST(?) be allowed in cite keys?

[Stefan Nobis <stefan-ml@snobis.de>]

tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye) writes:

> It strikes me that basing core features of the citation syntax on
> the software users happen to be using today is a bit like this--at
> some point the design of the system will prove unprepared for new
> developments.

I don't think this is a big problem. We are talking about citation
managers, that already have to interface to different word processors.
They have to be configurable. Also, I don't think it makes any sense
for developers of citation engines to generate keys with random signs.

On the other hand, if we want to be really liberal in terms of keys,
we must allow whitespace, arbitrary unicode values etc. In this case,
its a hard problem to delimit the key because any character we use as
delimiter (like <>, ``, "", etc.) may be used inside the key.

So some constraints for the key are always necessary. I don't know
every citation manager out there but I'm quite confident that all of
them are quite configurable and that keys containing whitespace or
ending in punctuation characters are really corner cases that could
and should be handled in the citation manager.

IMHO keys with lots of ??? in them are a sign of a data problem.
Therefore the author should solve the root cause.

-- 
Until the next mail...,
Stefan.