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Procmail fractional scoring screwed up.

2003-03-05 12:34:02
J. Hardin identified a problem with fractional base issues
a while ago in some of his recipes.  I guess I have
confirmed that it is still an issue and, further, there
is a major problem with fractional exponent scoring as
well.  Some of my observations:

John's 'good' value of .11  for a base doesn't work on my
version of procmail/redhat.  It actually gives bad results
and .1 gives the correct ones.  E.G. .1^1 with 100 matches
gives 10 but .11^1 with 100 matches gives <1.  Actually
quite a few of the fractional bases in the range 0.01-0.99 are
flaky but there seems to be no pattern; for example .03
is fine and so are .66 and .05, but .55 is screwed.  I find
this rather disconcerting from a computer :-/.

Fractional exponents are also completely buggered and do not
behave as procmailsc says they should, at least with bases
less than 3 or so.  E.G. with 10 matches 1^.9 should be ~6.5
(asymptotically approaching 10) but procmail returns ~1 and
only goes up to one with large matches.  What's the deal here?

It seems if you stray from 1^1 or non-integer bases and
exponents you better test it first to make sure things
work; because they often are broken.  This scoring is
trivial and I would have hoped it was working as advertised
in a program as old a procmail.  Quite disappointing :-(.

--
Daryle A. Tilroe


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