On 14 June 2001, Paul Prescod said:
> I would rather see us try a new approach to regular expressions. I've
> seen a few proposals for more verbose-but-readable syntaxes. I think one
> was from Greg Ewing? And maybe one from Ping?
I remember Ping's from a few year's back. It was pretty cool, but
awfully verbose. I *like* the compactness of the One True Regex
Language (ie. the one implemented by Perl 5, PCRE, and SRE).
> For those of us who use regular expressions only once in a while (i.e.
> the lucky ones), the current syntax is a holy terror. Which characters
> are magical again? In what contexts? With how many levels of
> backslashing? Upper case W versus lower case W?
Wow, you should try keeping grep vs. egrep vs. sed vs. awk (which
version again?) vs. emacs straight. I generally don't bother: as soon
as a problem gets too hairy for grep/sed/awk/etc., I whip out my trusty
old friend "perl -e" and all is well again. Unless I'm already coding
in Python of course, in which case I whip out my trusty old friend
re.compile(), and everything just works. I guess I just have a good
memory for line noise.
> Obviously we can never abandon the tried and true Perl5 RE module, but I
> think we could have another syntax on top.
Yeah, I s'pose it could be useful. Yet another great teaching tool, at
any rate.
Greg
--
Greg Ward - Python bigot gward@python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/
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