IKADN

Introduction

IKADN stands for Ivan Kravarščan's abstract data notation. It is foundation for concrete solutions for textually representing data.

Format

All data notations built on top of IKADN have to comply to following rules for data container:

• Data is represented as stream of UTF-8 characters
• Stream of characters is finite
• Stream contains zero or more valid objects (units of data)

And these rules for data layout:

• Each object has to start with a certain sign (a non-white space character)
• Each legal object format has to have unambiguous object boundaries
• White spaces between objects are ignored

Grammar

Above data layout rules can be expressed with following grammar:

D → O*
O → S₀F₀
O → S₁F₁
⋮
O → S_nF_n

Where D is a document (stream of characters), O an object, S_i a sign, and F_i a object format. It's up to concrete data notation to define a set of signs and formats for its data types.