[NNTP] wildmat-exact

[Peter Robinson]

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

> Peter Robinson said:
>
> > Is there a good reason
> > why we don't have the following: ?
> > 
> >         wildmat = ["!"] wildmat-pattern *("," ["!"] wildmat-pattern)
> >                   ^^^^^
> 
> A wildmat of the form "!a" would mean, according to our semantics, either
> the same as "*,!a" or would match nothing. The former is better expressed
> explicitly and the latter is nugatory.

OK, that's good enough for me.

> > The other possibility is to exclude ! from wildmat-exact.  Any future
> > extension that needs to use wildmats to match strings containing ! will
> > probably need to be able to match the other excluded characters (*?,\[])
> > as well as "!".  Presumably it will do that by permitting them and using
> > \ as an escape character.
> 
> Which is something we looked out but left out, for now, because of problems
> with the corner cases.

I certainly don't think we should try to do all that now.  For clarity,
all I'm saying is that forbidding ! is no worse than any of the other
special characters, and because of the excellent way this document
handles that, the transition to the obvious future extension (if it's
ever needed) should be smooth.

Regards,

Peter