At 05:06 PM 11/12/98 -0800, Alan K. Stebbens wrote:
Let's suppose that the real goal of Sieve is to establish a usable email
filtering standard for the Internet, one which lets users across the
Internet easily define filtering rules. Given this supposition, is it
better that a few programmers work harder to write a good parser, or better
to have millions of Internet users work harder to write their filters in yet
another "easy to implement" but difficult to understand language?
It appears to me that Sieve tries to be both, easy to implement and easy
to understand. However, I found the implementation of Sieve-03 to be
quite challenging. You have to handle any number of nested allof(),
anyof(), and if/then/else statements. Adding the tagged arguments,
such as :is, make it more difficult for humans to read and write,
and the syntax for comparators is obscure (at least for me).
Overall, these issues don't concern me much. I really doubt that we
are going to have millions of internet users writing Sieve scripts.
I expect most services will have a easy point and click interface
to create the filter rules, hiding Sieve details.
Greg Sereda
Greg