Re: [Nmh-workers] Relative Message Numbers

[Bill Wohler]

address@hidden writes:

> Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Hm.  I'm torn.  So, it looks like it's okay in terms of syntax; "_" is
>> not a valid character in a sequence.  But what are the semantics if
>> 'name' refers to more than one message?
>
> Then name+n is the nth message of name; name_n is the nth to last message of 
> name.(1 based ordinals. That is, name+1 is the first message of name and 
> name_1 is the last message of name).

Hey Norm, how is this useful? I can't see anyone manually referring to
the nth item in a sequence on the command line. The point of a sequence
is that you don't have to know the constituents. Maybe you have a use
case.

If this is for programmatic use, it seems that something like

    for i in $(mark -list -sequence cur | cut -f 1 -d " " --complement); do
        scan $i;
    done

would be clearer.

Saaay, it just occurred to me. Maybe we should adopt MH-E's syntax.
Norm, please check out MH-E ranges [1]. While it's not identical to your
specification, it sure is nifty for MH-E users. If this works for you,
maybe applying the same syntax to nmh would mean that many more users
would be more familiar with the syntax than with _.

http://mh-e.sourceforge.net/manual/html/Ranges.html

-- 
Bill Wohler <address@hidden> aka <address@hidden>
http://www.newt.com/wohler/
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