Tim Showalter wrote:
Randall Gellens <randy(_at_)Qualcomm(_dot_)Com> writes:
At 3:17 PM -0500 2/9/00, Ken Murchison wrote:
CMU Sieve currently strips all single backslashes in quoted strings,
which seems to be one reasonable implementation based on the working in
the spec. This behavior requires that any escaped meta-character in a
regex must be preceded by two backslashes. This behavior also effects
the :matches match-type in the base spec and imapflags as defined in
draft-melnikov-sieve-imapflags-02.
I am not up to speed on the discussions that led to the current wording
in the spec, but I'd like to see all escape sequences passed through
untouched, or perhaps be context-sensitive as hinted at in the spec.
But, "this is just my opinion, and I could be wrong."
I agree with you. Two backslashes should mean one literal backslash.
"\." in a regexp should mean a literal dot. "\\." should mean a
literal backslash followed by any character. Otherwise it's too
confusing.
I believe that this is impossible to correctly parse without passing
information between the parser and the lexer in a very unsavory way.
In particular, if you're trying to decide what a backslash means at
the lexer level, you can't, and you have to wait until the string is
used in context.
I'm not happy that the spec says what it does. It was a mistake.
For consistancy, I believe only \ and \" should be significant in a
string; to escape a metacharacter, the syntax should be "\\?" (i.e.,
match a literal question mark). The sequence "\\\?" is not
syntactically legal.
Programmers can grasp this (it's what C, Perl, and some Lisp
implementations do) and no one else will understand it, no matter what
we decide.
I would like to change the spec to reflect the behavior implemented in
CMU's Sieve implementation.
Tim,
When might you get to this? Alexey suggested that I add an example or
two to the regex spec, but I want this to jive with the wording in the
base spec.
Ken
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Kenneth Murchison Oceana Matrix Ltd.
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