GNU Mailutils Manual (split by node):   Section:   Chapter:FastBack: Sieve Language   Up: Sieve Language   FastForward: Reporting Bugs   Contents: Table of ContentsIndex: Function Index

5.1 Lexical Structure

Whitespace and Comments

Comments are semantically equivalent to whitespace and can be used anyplace that whitespace is (with one exception in multi-line strings, as described below).

There are two kinds of comments: hash comments, that begin with a ‘#’ character that is not contained within a string and continue until the next newline, and C-style or bracketed comments, that are delimited by ‘/*’ and ‘*/’ tokens. The bracketed comments may span multiple lines. E.g.:

if size :over 100K
  { # this is a comment
    discard;
  }
  
if size :over 100K
  { /* this is a comment
       this is still a comment */ discard /* this is a comment again
     */ ;
  }

Like in C, bracketed comments do not nest.

Lexical Tokens

The basic lexical entities are identifiers and literals.

An identifier is a sequence of letters, digits and underscores, that begins with a letter or underscore. For example, header and check_822_again are valid identifiers, whereas 1st is not. A special form of identifier is tag: it is an identifier prefixed with a colon (‘:’), e.g.: :comparator.

A literal is a data that is not executed, merely evaluated “as is”, to be used as arguments to commands. There are four kinds of literals:

GNU Mailutils Manual (split by node):   Section:   Chapter:FastBack: Sieve Language   Up: Sieve Language   FastForward: Reporting Bugs   Contents: Table of ContentsIndex: Function Index