ietf-mta-filters
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Re: Working Group Last Call on draft-ietf-sieve-variables-00.txt

2005-02-17 17:10:31

On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 18:44 -0500, Mark E. Mallett wrote:
My prediction is that something returning the entire match string will
be much more useful than something returning the count of matches.

I agree, I can't really think of a use case for the count, so I probably
shouldn't have included it in the first place.

I'd rather have both, though, and providing them is really a minor thing,
no matter how late it is.

anyone else have an opinion?

[${0} is the match, ${#} is the count]
Or keep ${0} as the count, and add something else (e.g. ${*}) as the
complete match string.

${*} (shell) or ${&} (sed, Perl), I guess.  ${0} as match corresponds to
e.g. awk.  ${:} as in Python's [:] could work, too, but is strange
without the range.  so many options ...

explicit is better than implicit -- users can just add an extra pair of
parentheses.  (this only applies to :regex.  for :matches, the match
string is always equal to the source string.)

Indeed it is- it's still useful to be able to access it.

you're right, that's actually awkward to do with :matches without this
feature:

   if header :matches ["To", "Cc"] ["kj*", "za*"]

the above needs to be replaced by four individual statements.  whether
that is _compelling_, I'll leave for someone else to say :-)

4.  Action set

   > An illegal name MUST cause a syntax error.

"MUST be detected as a syntax error" ?  (at compile time?  runtime?)

Just to be clear, my main comment was about the wording "must cause a
syntax error" being wrong.  The parenthesised "compile time or runtime"
was a side comment and yeah, it's probably obvious that it's compile
time.

what's wrong?  you mean s/cause/handled as/ ?

-- 
Kjetil T.