A. Shiraz Siddiq asks an interesting question that deserves a fair
answer. One fair answer has been fielded, albeit partly in less than
fair tone: It's in C; look at the code. But the obvious answer seems
not to be the only fair answer.
For one thing, the distributed code bears many a telltale mark of
being something distinct from the source, in the usual sense of that
word. I've assumed all along that the distribution gets generated --
in part automatically -- from a more supple notation, probably one
whose computational properties are more readily ascertained, the
ultimate source -- some of it anyway -- being "in" Maths. The pattern
matcher, for example, is said to be, if my memory serves me, O(n+m) n
and m being the length of the pattern and the text respectively, so
parts of procmail are in fact the objects of serious analysis. Those
bits can be said, in a perfectly good sense, to be "in" something
other than C, whatever form their executable implementation takes.
For those reasons I was surprised by some of the answers to Mr
Siddiq's perfectly fair question. (In truth, I don't even find his
conjecture foolish; it just happens that none of the code of procmail
proper is implemented as scripts for a suitable interpreter; SmartList
is another matter.)
Whatever procmail is "in", it is transparently clear to its fans, I
among them, what it is "of": elixir.
Regards,
Terry