Re: I-D ACTION:draft-daboo-sieve-include-03.txt (fwd)

["Aaron Stone" <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2005, Cyrus Daboo <[e-mail]> said:

> One other issue: how should include scripts interact with variables? Some 
> questions to illustrate this problem:
> 
> 1) Should a variable defined in a 'parent' script be available in 'child' 
> (included) scripts?
>
> 2) Should a variable defined in a 'child' script be available in the 
> 'parent' script after the point of inclusion? And if so, should those 
> variables be available to other 'child' scripts included after that point?
> 
> 3) Should variables defined in a 'child' script only be local to that 
> script?
> 
> Comments?

According to the changelog in the ietf-variables-06 draft, a clarification
was made that variables do span includes. I could not find where this was
specified in the document, however. It sounds like the open issue is being
left to the include draft to resolve ;-)

I program most frequently in C and in PHP. I can't think how we might
apply any of C's scoping rules because curly braced scopes do not exist in
Sieve. Everything is global. This rather reminds me of PHP, actually.

Applying a PHP-ish model, each file would have a totally clean namespace.
If you wanted a variable to cross both namespaces, you would declare it
Global. In the ietf-variables-06 draft, section 4.1, gives a list of
modifiers. How about a :global modifier?

set :global "a";
# Now ${a} in this script points to the same memory as ${a} everywhere.

But... both set is defined like this:
   Usage:    set [MODIFIER] [COMPARATOR] <name: string> <value: string>

So how about this:

set :global "a" "${a}"

Or perhaps:

set :import "a" "${a_from_my_parent}"
set :export "a_back_to_parent" "${a}"


Aaron