I believe machine readable is more important.
Let the user agent figure out a way to make it pretty: a filtering set
should be quickly parsed by a machine. It's not too hard to make a gui
filter-maker that lets you cover various levels of user sophistication
(from full egrep parsing of headers and/or body to just 'has bob in the from
line').
On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Tim Showalter wrote:
I'm working on a draft for a filtering language. I have one fairly
fundamental question: should the language be geared to be machine-readable
or human-writable? It would be far easier to write a prefix-oriented
language with lots of LISP-like syntax, but I believe most users find that
difficult to use (and it is my limited experience it's hard to balance
parens without an editor that helps out).
If it's machine readable, logical operators should be prefix. Syntax should
not be overly important.
If it's human writable, logical operators should be infix. Syntax should be
geared towards preventing syntax errors and readability.
Any comments will be appreciated.
--
Tim Showalter
tjs(_at_)andrew(_dot_)cmu(_dot_)edu