ietf-nntp Wildmats

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
> > But now look at
> > 	(X)PAT Subject 123- *foo,bar bar,baz*
> > meaning the same as
> > 	(X)PAT Subject 123- *foo,bar\Sbar,baz*
> 
> > The first one looks like it is intended to match:
> > 	Subject: foo bar
> > 	Subject: foo baz
> > 	Subject: bar bar
> > 	Subject: bar baz
> > whereas the second one looks like it is intended to match
> > 	Subject: foo
> > 	Subject: bar bar
> > 	Subject: baz

> but using
> space as alternation seems very odd to me.

No, he's using argument separation as a higher level version of
concatentation. That is, the first example is *roughly* the regex
    "^(.*foo|bar) (bar|baz.*)$"

I think that's wrong.

> My preference at the moment is to standardize on being able to escape a
> comma with \, forbid spaces in wildmats, introduce \uXXXX (and probably \U
> as well), and say that PAT takes only one argument.  It makes PAT look
> different than XPAT; I have no problems with that.

Agreed.

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