ietf-nntp new draft of base document available

[Russ Allbery]

Howard Swinehart <howard at redrose.net> writes:

> Won't ! be ambiguous regardless of the order?

! is not at all ambiguous in existing implementations; the code that
implements it produces a well-defined result given any input.  What about
it do you think is ambiguous?

> Maybe what's needed is an exclusion operator.  ^ for example.

Please let's not try to change wildmat syntax in a document intended to
document existing practice.

wildmat patterns, including comma-separated patterns with !, have a
well-defined meaning that's already implemented in software.  The syntax
is unlike other matching syntaxes and isn't always intuitive, but that
indicates the need for clear documentation of how it works, not a need to
change it.  Too many clients already understand how the existing syntax
works.

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