[Cs5500] Possible whitespace issues using the DemF print() function

[Reto Kleeb]

Hey,

about a week ago we discussed that a system that serializes objects to 
strings (and back), (eg. XML or like in our case in DemF defined syntax) 
should have the following property:

String serialized = "MY-OBJECT AS A STRING"
Object myObj = Object.parse(serialized)

assertEquals(serialized, myObj.serializeToString())

and

assertEquals(myObj, Object.parse(myObj.serializeToString()))

It could be argued that these two tests do the same, but I argue that 
only if we include the first test, we verify our system against a 
"hand-written, visible" string.

In our project such a test looks like this:

String inpt = "hsr.HSRInstanceSet {{ HSR (9,2) }} 
scg.protocol.ForAllExists {{    }} 0.44444 0.44444";

Claim claim = Claim.parse(inpt);

Assert.assertEquals(inpt, claim.print());

The problem now is, that this test fails, DemeterF adds an extra white 
space character in the printed string 
(http://img685.imageshack.us/i/demfwhitespace.png/). This is obviously 
related to the *s in the grammar.

Now our question basically is, is this something that we need to accept 
in this situation? Or can we get DemeterF to omit these extra characters 
without changing the grammar?

Best

Reto (PRX)