Date: 25 Mar 1996 06:29:03 GMT
Message-ID: <19960325062903.12864.qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu>
From: djb@koobera.math.uic.edu (D. J. Bernstein)
To: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: "." in phrase

> me too, absent any showstoppers surfacing.

Statistic: 0.02% of my stored messages include, inside an 822 structured
field other than Received, a domain name containing one or more spaces.

This suggests that there are millions of stored 822 messages that will
be misparsed if we remove "." from specials.

We can achieve the desired goal of adding "." to phrases without
changing the set of specials, without giving up the 822 tokenizer,
without complicating the 822 syntax, and without changing the complexity
of the simplest known 822 parser. I don't understand why solutions that
break compatibility are still under consideration.

---Dan