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Re: Procmail 4.0 WishList

2004-06-27 06:35:05
Kreme wrote,

I think, perhaps, a new delimiter set for "new style" recipes

:: flags
new recipe
contents here
;; end marker

to clearly differentiate the new functions and capabilities.

After reading that and a post from Michael Wise, I just sent a post where I indicated that specific "switch syntax" delimiters could work. (Although frankly, I see nothing in the proposals that was a concrete improvement except the repetition operator: use escaped braces instead of unescaped ones, and that's solved. Everything else proposed has been solely matters of taste.)

However, starting a line with "::" is a currently valid syntax for the start of a recipe that has one condition and no flags, so it could not be the switch-to-new-syntax mark. You could interchange the two and use ";;" to mean switch-to-new and "::" to mean switch-to-old. But if Michael actually meant that ":0" should meant "read under old grammar until further notice" and not, as I thought before, "read this line under the old grammar," then ":0" is a better switch-to-old marker (actually, switch-to-old and carry the colon-zero in), because anyone using the new syntax is not going to be using the very old pre-asterisk forms where recipes ever started without colon-zero, and the old-syntax section has to start with colon-zero anyway.

So, without addressing Sean's concerns about risks of confusing users but sticking with risk of confusing the program,

 ;;
 code under new syntax

 :0 flags # forces switch to interpreting by old syntax

would suit me fine.

No one is making any changes.  We're just talking here about what we
would like to see in a mythical imaginary update to procmail 4 that,
AFAIK, no one is working on.

Changes have been proposed and are under discussion; I never said that we all had to switch to a (not yet existing) new binary tomorrow!


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