ietf-nntp Wildmats

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Mon Nov 20 06:36:59 PST 2000


In <ylg0kq8abf.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:


>Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

>> I wasn't using space as alternation. What would YOU expect to be
>> recognised given
>> 	(X)PAT Subject 123- *foo,bar bar,baz* ?

>I would expect it to be a syntax error.

>Transforming " " to "\uXXXX" or whatever, I would expect it to match the
>literal subject "bar bar", any subject ending in "foo", and any subject
>beginning with "baz".

Yes, that's one way to look at it, but it would be counter-intuitive to
people who have been told that XPAT takes a sequence of independent
wildmats, which are to be matched in succession.

One of our problems is that, if we introduce ',' into wildmats and
existing implementations incorporate it, their XPAT implementations will
suddenly acquire some "interesting" properties. And since the official
definition of XPAT resides in our recently-finalised Common Extensions
RFC, they won't find the answer by looking in there :-( .

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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