[Python-Dev] extended print statement, uPre-PEP

[Skip Montanaro]

    Paul> Common Lisp and Linux are victims of feature creep. Perl and
    Paul> Sendmail just suck.

Whoa there!  Not to get into an off-topic shouting match of tit-for-tat, but
Sendmail's syntax dates from a time when things were a lot less uniform than
they are today.  Machines were a helluva lot slower, had lots less memory
and faced a decidedly less uniform email environment than later tools did.
I don't believe early versions of Sendmail had "frozen" config files either,
so parsing fast (probably with a very crude, ad hoc parser) was important.
The universe of email possibilities -- both in addressing and connectivity
-- was much broader than it is today.  You had !-paths, Bitnet, SMTP, CSNet,
direct connections, store-and-forward and fewer standards (like RFC-822 and
its descendants).  Unlike more recent tools, Sendmail did it all.

That very few people ever have to stare at a raw sendmail.cf file anymore is
a big credit to the Sendmail gang in my opinion...

Skip