ietf-mta-filters
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Re: Sieve-Notify and potential associative arrays.

2005-02-04 11:13:02


> I'm a fan of associative arrays, having first used them in the Sail quite some
> time ago. (Anyone else remember Sail?) However, I have to say I think
> associative arrays would be serious overkill for sieve. Yes, I realize they're
> powerful, but they introduce significant language and implementation
> complexity.

It's really only read only associative arrays I was proposing, so that
eliminates a large amount of complexity.  If read-only associative arrays
are overkill for Sieve then how best can we support authoring of simple
messages based on the content of the inbound mail?

This begs the question of whether or not complex header transformations are
something we should be doing with sieve. I happen to think the answer to this
particular question is "no". Copying a subject and perhaps a couple of other
fields into a new message is about as far as I think sieve needs to go.

Of course there are all sorts of more complex things people will want to do.
But this is a seriously slippery slope, because lurking not far away are
things like content summaries, keyword extraction, translation services,
content shaping, and so on. This stuff has "research problem" written all
over it, and IMO sieve needs to stay away from this space.

Do you/we favour the $subject$ approach?

I think it is just sufficient to get the jobs appropriate for sieve done.

I guess I would accept some implementation complexity
if it means the language is easier to use....

Ease of use is a two-edged sword. One of the things sieve is used for is
as an output format for GUI filter builder utilities. Variables are already
pretty hard to handle in such tools, things like associative arrays
are really over the top.

                                Ned