Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!itsgw!steinmetz!vdsvax!barnett
From: barnett@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com (Bruce Barnett)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Suggested EASE enhancements
Message-ID: <7199@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 1 Mar 89 14:14:02 GMT
References: <25462@cornell.UUCP>
Sender: news@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com
Reply-To: barnett@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com (Bruce Barnett)
Organization: GE Corp. R & D, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 59
In-reply-to: parmelee@wayback.cs.cornell.edu (Larry Parmelee)

In article <25462@cornell.UUCP>, parmelee@wayback (Larry Parmelee) writes:
>I've seen a couple notes recently about people working on enhancements
>to or a new version of Ease.

As far as I know, I am the only one. If anyone else is considering this,
please contact me. I will be giving the enhancements to the author, who
will come out with the official update.

>EASE wish list:
>
>Within a quoted string, emit a warning about dollar signs ('$') if
>they are not immediately followed by a '{'.

You got it. I just added this to Ease 2.1.


>Add a comment operator of some sort.  For example, maybe
>
>	comment{ blah blah blah };
>
>to translate into
>
>	## blah blah blah
>
>The idea is to have something that the C-Preprocessor won't
>strip out.

I don't understand.
The C preprocessor is run before Ease.
If it gets the -C option, it does NOT delete comments.

Ease 2.1 supports the C preprocessor directly so you can just type

et -C file.ease >file.cf

>
>The re-write part of rules (corresponding to the LHS in the *.cf file)
>could be done better.  I'd like to see the "$<digit>" stuff eliminated.
>Something like this:
>(Assume field ROUTE,ADDRESS,UUCPPATH,MAILBOX : match(1*);
>        field HOST1 match(1);  )

>		retry(HOST1!UUCPPATH!MAILBOX);


My first ease file for smail did this. However, I found that
making the rules overly wordly confused the understanding of sendmail.

In my own opinion, I would not like this new syntax.

Also, I don't have time for this myself. I wanted to provide
basic functionality first.

The changes required are substantial, and
I have Real work to do :-). But I will consider some of your ideas.

--
	Bruce G. Barnett 	barnett@ge-crd.ARPA, barnett@steinmetz.ge.com
				uunet!steinmetz!barnett