Hi Caskey :-)
On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Caskey Dickson wrote:
>On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 08:51:14AM +0100, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote:
>In the interest of being pedantic...
>Is:
> July...2nd -> July/.2nd
>Or:
> July...2nd -> July./2nd
July./2nd is correct.
>If it is the former, how is the latter represented, if the latter, how
>about the former? You'll need more information to properly encode both
>a value and an escape character. You could expand the separator to two
>characters, an escape character and a data character ('..' vs. '.+' or
>'.\' or '.!') but it is of course ugly.
Left-to-right, leftmost derivative. That's as precise as it gets. What it
means is that if you read two dots, replace them with one dot and then
read the next character. :-)
>Then there's the option of adding another escape character, such as the
>infamous '\'. 'foo\..bar' is 'foo./bar' and 'foo.\.bar' is 'foo/.bar'
>and then you have to add '\\' as mapping to the '\' character. And
>declare '\[anything]' as mapping to '[anything]' just so you have a
>deterministic mapping of 'foo\\\bar' (not that binc would create such a
>thing, but we can't just crash if we find it).
I thought a little about that. The escape character '\' would crash with
it being a famous shell escape character, so that would perhaps not be too
good. :P Also, the '.' is not an escape character today, because 'B.A'
means 'B/A', and we don't want to make things too complex. ;)
Andy
--
Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg
Author of Binc IMAP | Nil desperandum
