Re: empty quoted strings and other oddities

[Bruce Lilly <[e-mail]>]

Keith Moore wrote:

> first of all, it's really not a boundary condition - it's just one example 
> of an invalid address

It's a boundary condition as it's a unique case (zero content).

 > second, your conclusion doesn't follow even if
> it is a boundary condition - all that is necessary is that it not cause
> any problems.

An MTA or MUA that does not handle [] well may indeed cause
problems.  That might range from (multiple) DNS lookups of
garbage, or malformed DNS lookups to a program crash.

> well, it's not like those thousands of existing implementations of email
> software are going to change their implementation techniques just to
> accomodate this case.  

If it becomes a MUST NOT generate construct, damage can be
prevented even if an existing defective implementation of
a receiver does not change.

> as for use of lex, I've tried it.  it's not a good fit.  2822 syntax analysis 
> is somewhat context-dependent (is "Mon" a day or an atom?),  good error 
> recovery is difficult, and you need to have the lexical analyzer recover from
> common syntax errors (such as putting dot in a phrase) in situations where
> look-ahead is required to disambiguate that kind of error from other 
> errors.
> 
> Having done both, I can confidently say that it's easier to write correct 
> C code to do the scanning than to write correct lex code to do it.

Having done both, I've come to the opposite conclusion, but
that's a bit off topic.

> adding cruft to the standard (or to code) to detect cases which
> never happen is not progress.

We're not talking about detection, but rather about relegating
a useless and potentially troublesome construct to MUST NOT
generate status.

> progress is increasing the reliability
> of mail delivery.

Is that relevant to the message format (as opposed to transport
methods and protocols)?