<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Steven Kurylo <<a href="mailto:sk@infinitepigeons.org">sk@infinitepigeons.org</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">> The problem with this is that one needs to think like a programmer to<br>
> describe your "ideal phone" as a set of rules like these. Not only does<br>
> one have to think analytically and dissect their concept into orthogonal,<br>
> machine-checkable rules, but from your examples it's also clear that for<br>
> such a wide range of possibilities a whole *language* with *expressions*<br>
> (at least boolean) is necessary.<br>
<br>
</div>I see it as something like sieve. Its a pretty full language for<br>
writing rules. I, as a programmer, I do almost anything I want. For<br>
the non-programmers there are various GUIs which allow you to do all<br>
the simple tasks with a couple clicks. In fact filter email is fairly<br>
similar: if these three things are true, do X. Then I have a stack of<br>
rules and it goes through them one at time until one is true.<br>
<br>
xpath might work. There are a few options, though I would try to stay<br>
away from writing our own if it can be helps. A plan old python class<br>
might be enough with function for each possible condition.<br>
<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Sieve - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)</a><br>xpath - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath</a><br>
<br></div></div><br></div>