Subject: Re: Who will write filtering scripts?

From: "Jack De Winter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 23:04:04 -0500

At 06:09 PM 3/27/97 -0800, Brian Moore wrote:
>I believe machine readable is more important.
>
>Let the user agent figure out a way to make it pretty: a filtering set
>should be quickly parsed by a machine.  It's not too hard to make a gui
>filter-maker that lets you cover various levels of user sophistication
>(from full egrep parsing of headers and/or body to just 'has bob in the from
>line').

If it isn't too much problem, it would be interesting if there was
a switch, and a cannonicalization that explains how to go from one
to the other.  This could simply be considered an extra pass on the
script human->machine->compiled and turned on by default.  Kind of
like how the unix shell scripts work.

I realize that it makes a bit more work for Tim, but as I outlined
to him earlier at the ACAP conference, having a simplist, yet effective
scripting language is a powerful tool.  I got a sneak peak, and the line
"if size over 10K then bounce ... endif" was pretty straight forward.
if you take it a step further and throw out any words that your grammar
does not recognize, "if the message size if over 10K then bounce end"
becomes very useful.

my 2 cents.
regards,
Jack
-------------------------------------------------
Jack De Winter - Wildbear Consulting, Inc.
(519) 576-3873		http://www.wildbear.on.ca/

Author of SLMail for 95 & NT (http://www.seattlelab.com/)

---

From: Tim Showalter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 23:22:09 -0500 (EST)

> like how the unix shell scripts work.

This is a good excuse to write a machine-parsable language and worry about
high-level languages in some other context.  This might encourage GUIs for
the language as well.

> does not recognize, "if the message size if over 10K then bounce end"

Allowing random "harmless" words in the grammar does not seem like a good
idea, especially if anyone wants a chance to ever extend it.  I do not
believe there is any utility in this; it presents the illusion of usability
to programmers without presenting any usability to users.

Would there be any violent objections if I tried to write something geared
towards machine-parsing (strictly prefix, probably a LISP like syntax
because I believe it's easiest to parse), but still editable by mere
mortals?  We could layer a readable language over top of that.

(I like LISP anyway, so I'm sort of becoming biased towards this approach.)

-- 
                                           Tim Showalter [email-masked]