[NNTP] Snapshot 5

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Charles Lindsey said:
>> I'm also not a fan of the modifiers, especially the comment modifier.
> Granted they are ugly, they do serve a useful purpose. Would they be less
> conspicuous if they appeared at the end of the line of output rather than
> at the beginning. People who did not care for them could then ignore them,
> and there would be less parsing hassle.

Actually there would be more hassle, because now we'd be restricting the
form of capability line arguments. At present the parsing is:

    * Split line into tokens on white space.
  #if understand-modifiers
    * While (first token begins with non-alphanumeric)
      - First token is a modifier;
      - if known, process it and remove from list of tokens
        else ignore entire line
  #else
    * If (first token begins with non-alphanumeric)
      - ignore entire line
  #endif
    * If (first token begins with digit)
      - error
    * First token is capability label. Process it and remove from the list.
    * While (tokens remain)
      - process token as argument to label.

As for "less conspicuous", this is a machine protocol we're talking about.
You shouldn't be trying to hide things!

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