Alex's analysis was orthogonal to what I thought the criteria would
be. I'd thought Sieve had some advantages in being able to support
SMTP directly; if it does, I can't tell from his comments. And his
bottom line, about a partially defined language seeming more
attractive than a fully defined language, is a cogent observation.
For me, the requirements are powerful expressions for matching,
easy-to-use variables, and support for parsing network headers.
Also the ability to dispatch to the OPES callout server quickly
and to get replies.
I'd like a narrowly scoped, limited language, because I want to
make it very fast for the OPES matching and dispatching functions.
It has to have a good interface to the underlying OS network
functions.
Failing that, I'll take a general purpose pre-existing language!
So, I'm not thrilled with Sieve, but am willing to work with it, based
on my reading of the drafts last year. P still seems vague and
undistinguished.
Hilarie