[IRCServices Coding] Fw: [Coders] RFCs and nicknames (Re: NS LINK and NS SET PRIVATE)

[Andrew Church]

>On Wed, 19 Jun 2002, Andrew Church wrote:
>
>>      Yeah, I checked the other supported servers and noticed that they
>> all support such nicks too... and to be honest I'm in full agreement with
>> Stskeeps that that part of the RFC (among others) is out of date; I just
>> wish there was something more up to date that everyone could agree on.
>> (Is this where someone jumps in and says "if you want to get something
>> done, do it yourself"?)
>> 
>>   --Andrew Church
>>     achurch at achurch.org
>>     http://achurch.org/
>
>Well, if you read the RFC
>
>
>Because of IRC's scandanavian origin, the characters {}| are considered to 
>be the lower case equivalents of the characters []\, respectively. This is 
>a critical issue when determining the equivalence of two nicknames.
>
>
>So the original ircd considered {}|[]\ to be "letters".

     *BZZZT* Nice try, thank you for playing.  To quote RFC1459:

<nick>    ::= <letter> { <letter> | <number> | <special> }
<letter>  ::= 'a' ... 'z' | 'A' ... 'Z'
<number>  ::= '0' ... '9'
<special> ::= '-' | '[' | ']' | '\' | '`' | '^' | '{' | '}'

     In other words, a "letter" is really a letter from A to Z, and not one
of []\{}|.  (It is true, however, that {}| and []\ were considered
case-insensitively equivalent.)

  --Andrew Church
    achurch at achurch.org
    http://achurch.org/