Sun, 10 Aug 1997 02:32:41 +0200
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On Sat, 9 Aug 1997 11:56:22 -0400 Russ <[log in to unmask]> said:
>My point, the routines should be able to accept an address exactly as
>any of the other routines might return it.
It's not that simple. Addresses are displayed using the RFC822 mailbox
format, which is the way all mail programs are supposed to display them
and the format that people will be expecting because in theory everyone
has to use it. In some tricky cases this format looks weird per the rules
in RFC822, and I don't think it would be appropriate for LISTSERV to
invent its own non-compliant display format for this. The input format is
different in these tricky cases because the commands are based on blank
separated parameters, not on the RFC822 format where white space is
allowed just about everywhere and you know the extent of the address
portion advance (ie you don't have to decide "this is the end of the
address and the beginning of the rest of the command"). Another reason is
that the RFC822 quoting rules are known to be obscure and
counter-intuitive and are not a good model to use for your command
parser. Let's just say many mail products got it wrong because the
developers could not understand them :-) Only ADD supports this input
format, for convenience (and because it knows that the whole command line
is a mailbox + name). LISTSERV uses a simpler system for command line
arguments where you enclose things in quotation marks and there aren't
2000 sub-rules. If you don't want to learn this escaping sequence, you
can use wildcards, which also saves typing.
Eric
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