On Mon, 12 Feb 2018 09:27:04 +0000 Ralph Corderoy <[email protected]> wrote: Ralph Corderoy writes: > Hi Paul, > > > i just don't know whether MH can attract new users through a rewrite. > > That wouldn't be the aim. The aim would be for the existing users to > have a code base that allowed more rapid, stable development of new > features, deprecating old warts, and improving consistency. > > For example, whilst I like the Unix idiom of one command to do one thing > well, I do find myself doing a series of picks, marks, and scans to > whittle down emails whereas having a consistent, planned, notation that > can be used wherever a message number can be given would lessen the > iterations a lot. `seq=-3' is nice, but I can't do `seq:-3:2', for > example. And overall it's warty, so warty no one replied to my > http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2017-09/msg00014.html > :-)
I don't remember your message but I did look at message sequence number selection in some detail when I was implementing it in Go. My initial implemention just treated it as simple number sequences independent of context but messages that match a selection expession depend on which messages exist. As an example, if you have messages 1 2 5 8 in a mailbox, Thus 5:3 match es 5 & 8. And the start message need not exist. 10:-2 matchs 5 & 8 but 10:1 fails. The semantics are fairly consistent. Except for last! last:2 matches 5 & 8 but 8:2 matches only 8. But last is a small anomaly. I can see extending it so that an expressions as seq:-3:2 (which would be equivalent to seq=-3:2) works but given the context sensitivity, I think it would be rather confusing. But I admit I have often wanted next:n or prev:n. -- Nmh-workers https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
