mailing-list to bugs

[Erik Christiansen]

On 08.05.18 20:46, Derek Martin wrote:
> I dare say no one should want to work in Perl anymore...  It's such a
> horrible mishmash of a lanugage.

+1

> But C is probably not the best tool for this job either.  Python has
> modules for handling e-mail and for talking to bugzilla, and for my
> money it's way, way nicer to code in than Perl.

A language which handles (ERE) regexes directly is distinctly to be
preferred. Labouring like a Trojan in C has whiskers on it. OK, I have
done some work with lex & bison, coupled with a regex library, and that
allows the job to be done in C, but even that intermediate level
approach is a lot of work, with resolution of parser conflicts making a
long job of what is much quicker with a less grammatically hidebound
parser in Awk or similar.

Given the expressed familiarity with C, I'd propose Awk as the parsing
language. It has POSIX EREs and a C-like syntax. The Addison-Wesley book
"The AWK Programming Language" was written by the language's authors,
and is a goldmine - brief, to the point, and wonderfully indexed. It is
admittedly too old to include more recent developments like coprocesses,
which allow an Awk daemon to talk to other processes over pipes, but you
can just invoke Awk once per email.

Erik