dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (06/11/87)
In article <788@mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) quotes somebody who says: >> There is no such thing as a bang address. with: >Gee, what's that thing on the command line after "mail"? > >% mail snarf\!mumble\!scream\!person This is a good time to recapitulate. I originally posted an article suggesting that one ought to be able to specify precedence within a mail address, so [a!b]@c.EDU would be different from a![b@c.EDU] and neither would be ambiguous. Here is a summary of the objections that were raised to my suggestion and my response. Objection: We would have to add another special character to mail addresses and there is no point in complicating things. Response: Actually, we already have three pairs of characters used for bracketing: (), [], and <>. Since () is taken up for comments, that leaves [] and <>. Either set could be used. However, ARPAnet syntax uses [] to hold a numeric address. It would be kinder to ARPAnet software to let it keep the [], although there is not reason why such software could not be modified to recognize the meaning of [] by testing its contents to see whether they included anything other than digits and dots. But <> is already used to specify precedence, although only one level of <> is used. All we need to do is allow the nesting of <>. Objection: There is no such thing as a bang address. Response: Should we dignify this head-in-sand attitude by responding to it? I don't think so. Objection: There is no problem with precedence because @ always has the highest precedence, and anything to the left of that is only interpreted by the site named after the @. Response: This is pure chauvinism. A user of the ! syntax, whose mailer does not understand @ syntax, treats all addresses as made up of components separated by bangs. Even programs that understand both types of addresses may arbitrarily choose one over the other. As far as I can tell from the documentation, smail gives precedence to the ! over the @ when it sees both in the address field of an incoming message. I have encountered messages whose address fields were badly mangled because some sites gave precedence to @ and others gave precedence to !. Think about it, folks. Ken Iverson designed APL to be very regular in its operator precedence. With prefix notation, you ought to be able to dispense with all bracketing symbols. So why did he retain [] and () anyway? -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: {ihnp4,seismo}!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi
solejni@umbio.UUCP (06/25/87)
Paul, I would be grateful for assistance with mailing mail to system HASARA5, in Netherlands. I have no knowledge of e-mail, so if you could recoommend a source of published information/guidelines/tutorial, I would be most grateful. Thanks.