On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 12:09:12PM -0500, Mark Carroll wrote: > On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > In my effort to turn Haskell into a language more like Perl > > (muahaha)[1], I got a bit fed up and implemented something like Perl > > 5's =~ binding operator (a.k.a. "regex" operator); I thought maybe > (snip) > > This reminds me that one thing I do miss from the regex stuff I've found > so far in Haskell is Perl's ? operator for turning greedy matches into > minimally-short ones. I can still usually do what I need to with Parsec, > at least, but I just thought I'd mention the issue.
yeah, ? is awesome. of course, if I had my way, I'd go back in time and make non-greedy matching the default. The silly longest match rule breaks a lot of the computational niceness of regular expressions. ah.. em. sorry for the random rant, to get things back on track, I started writing a Template Haskell module to give one something like perls =~ but it syntax checked the regular expression at compile time and compiled it to efficient code rather than using the Regex module. so I didn't have to feel bad about writing /foo/ as I know it will be compiled to just a simple substring match. perhaps this will inspire someone to finish the project? a standard pcre (pcre.org) binding would also be a cool thing to work on. I looked into writing one, but by default pcre is compiled without utf-8 support on my system, which made binding to it somewhat useless for my particular task. however, if we could put a binding in the standard library, perhaps building a version which works with haskell unicode if necessary that would be cool. John -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe