Re: Boolean Operators for --script (again)

[Patrick Donnelly <batrick () batbytes com>]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 1:50 AM, Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org> wrote:
> It is probably worth making these case insensitive too.  We can still
> document them using the lower case form if that is preferred, but
> there is no need to fail just because someone forgot whether to use
> "NOT" or "not".

Ok I'll get this added in.

> > A couple examples:
>
> Examples are great and I'm glad you included them.  But can you also
> document the syntax?  It is a relatively simple grammar, so it doesn't
> need to be long documentation.  But people need to know the operator
> list, precedence rules, whether parenthetical expressions are allowed,
> how they interact with comma-separated lists, allowed whitespace
> rules, etc.  It is hard to focus on the high level when you're forced
> to read the code patch to figure out how the new system works.  We'll
> need such documentation when boolean ops are integrated anyway, so we
> might as well write at least a draft of the syntax for now.

Here's a rough draft of the Augmented BNF syntax:

====
; Note string literals in ABNF are case-insensitive
ruleset = rule *("," rule)
rule    = exp
exp     = "nil" / "false" / "true" / name / exp binop exp / unop exp
binop   = "and" / "or"
unop    = "not"
name    = %x21-%x2b /
          %x2d-%x3a /
          %x3c-%x7e ; All visible characteres except ',' and ';'
====

While this describes the syntax, the semantics are:

The binary and unary operators follow the same semantics and
precedence as in Lua.

A `name` can be a case-insensitive Category ("intrusive", "default",
etc.), a case-sensitive (is this ok?) filename with optional greedy
"*" (asterisk) wildcards to match many files. A filename may also have
an optional (ignored) .nse extension. Directories are not considered
valid in the above ruleset and are handled separately (we include all
script files in a directory).

-- 
-Patrick Donnelly

"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing
to do and always a clever thing to say."

-Will Durant

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