RE: Proposed Sieve extensions

[Gregory Sereda <gsereda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 05:06 PM 11/12/98 -0800, Alan K. Stebbens wrote:
>Let's suppose that the real goal of Sieve is to establish a usable email
>filtering standard for the Internet, one which lets users across the
>Internet easily define filtering rules.  Given this supposition, is it
>better that a few programmers work harder to write a good parser, or better
>to have millions of Internet users work harder to write their filters in yet
>another "easy to implement" but difficult to understand language?

It appears to me that Sieve tries to be both, easy to implement and easy
to understand.  However, I found the implementation of Sieve-03 to be
quite challenging.  You have to handle any number of nested allof(),
anyof(), and if/then/else statements.  Adding the tagged arguments,
such as :is, make it more difficult for humans to read and write,
and the syntax for comparators is obscure (at least for me).

Overall, these issues don't concern me much.  I really doubt that we
are going to have millions of internet users writing Sieve scripts.
I expect most services will have a easy point and click interface
to create the filter rules, hiding Sieve details.

Greg Sereda

Greg