Syntax 0.8 RFC1 until September 17

It’s time to kick off the first round of feedback about Syntax 0.8! Please consult the project board and comment on the issues proposed for this milestone.

There are a number of features proposed for Syntax 0.8 which I’d like to highlight:

  • Preserve content indent in multiline patterns (#162). Originally scheduled for 0.7, this issue has been postponed so that we have another chance to discuss it. @Pike has suggested a WIP implementation for the parser which removes the largest common indent of all lines of a pattern.

  • Semantic Comments! #139 and #140 are our two first issues about a new module of Fluent: semantic comments. @zbraniecki is leading the effort to create the spec for using them to describe variables passed into the translation by developers and other meta-information about messages and terms.

  • Allow more Unicode characters in TextElements (#174). Right now the spec only allows the characters from the Basic Multilingual Plane. I’d like to have a discussion before 1.0 about supporting other planes (and whether it’s possible to do given the reference parser is written in JS).

  • Two changes to using escape sequences: Remove backslash escapes from TextElement (#123) and Introduce a new Unicode literal (#115). Both intend to make escape sequences more visible inside of translations.

  • And a couple of other changes to the grammar and the AST: #142 is about storing identifiers with or without sigils in the AST, and #107 is about refactoring the grammar of the text_char production.

Please give your feedback on these issues by Monday, September 17. When this RFC period ends, we’ll conduct a triage session and decide which issues may need more time given the feedback received.