Re: [Nmh-workers] What are and what should be the qualifications for a current nmh user

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Nov 11, 2014, at 5:24 AM, Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote:

>   That is, the directory- and file-structure of UNIX is used directly.
>    As a result, any UNIX file-handling command can be applied to any
>    message.

And that was written in a land where email was unstructured 7-bit ASCII text.  
For better or worse, we have moved on.

But even in today's world, I could probably get 95% of the way back to the 
glory days if MH message files were stored on disk (1) in a decoded format 
(undo q-p and base64 for all text/* parts), and (2) all charset encoded text 
canonicalized to utf-8 (including the headers, in violation of the specs).

With that as a base, I could hack my usual text processing tools to use Pike's 
structural regular expressions[1] instead of the POSIX ones.  SREs have the 
ability to match across multiple lines of text, so you can do things like match 
on an entire MIME subpart and back-reference against just the contents.  
Incredibly powerful.

--lyndon

[1] See http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/87/3-se.ps.gz for Pike's 
introduction to SREs, and
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/sam/sam.html for some examples of their use 
in the Sam editor.

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