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From: milne@ics.uci.edu (Alastair Milne)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: Re: Showing the first message in a sequence
Message-ID: <13405@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 5 May 89 22:29:05 GMT
References: <306@odi.UUCP> <12879@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: Alastair Milne <milne@ics.uci.edu>
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Organization: Educational Technology Center, Dept. of ICS, UC Irvine
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John Romine <jromine@tertius.ics.uci.edu> writes
>In article <306@odi.UUCP> (Benson Margulies) writes:
>>I wanted a way to show the first unseen message in a folder.
>
>...Right now, you can use modifiers on
>"official" sequences ("first", "last", etc.) so you can say something
>like "scan first:10" to scan the first ten messages.  I always thought
>we should accept those modifiers on user-defined sequence names as well.

    What you really want is some recursive application of sequence specifiers,
    so that the sequence resulting from each can have a further sequence
    extracted from it.

    Like:
	sc unseen:first
	sc unseen:first:2
	sc unseen:last:5
	sc unseen:first:10:last:3  -- ie the unseen ones starting at the 8th
					and ending with the 10th.

    I'm just using "unseen" as a well-known sequence name.  I see no reason
    this shouldn't apply to any arbitrary sequence.

    Alastair Milne,
    UCI