ietf-nntp wildmat routines and text

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:

> While working on some text, I ran into a problem with this.

> In character sets, backslash isn't special at the moment. With any such
> syntax it becomes special. If you're going to have \u, then you might as
> well allow \\, \], \-, and so on, to have the "I literally mean the
> second character" meaning in character sets.

> Is this acceptable ?

I would really prefer to avoid all of this and just stick with wildmat the
way it's implemented right now but with the minimal change of specifying
the character set as being UTF-8.

Anything more is a rather significant change to the meaning of backslash.
I don't know how many people (if anyone) are currently taking advantage of
the fact that you can safely backslash everything in a string to ensure it
matches literally, but removing that is fairly significant.  (The changes
to character classes I'm less concerned about, since in practice I think
they're pretty rarely used.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>