On Tuesday 06 March 2007 09:23 am, Alan Burlison wrote:
> Alan DuBoff wrote:
> > My biggest gripe against it is that it's very easy for bugs to popup by
> > use of regular expressions, which plague Perl in practice. It's not that
> > regular expressions are bad, it's that in use it has shown that this has
> > been one of the areas where bugs have cropped up in Perl, historically.
>
> We better ban Java as well then.  It's REs are more-or-less identical to
> those in perl. ;-)

AlanB,

I wasn't suggesting we get rid of it, I do see the value in Perl, was just 
pointing how the area that has plagued Perl, and that has been regular 
expressions, historically.

Traditional init scripts have also used a lot of regular expressions, it 
didn't prevent them from working correctly. The bigger problem with Perl is 
when the code starts growing. For the way the system uses it, I don't see 
that as being a problem.

It's not as if folks need to be paranoid about regular expressions, it's just 
something to be aware of.

I don't know how you would replace all the functionality of Perl with 
something else in the same amount of space, so don't see Perl going the way 
of the dodo bird anytime soon. I would expect most of the space for heftier 
programs to be taken up in modules, not in Perl itself, so those can be 
layered on the system if/as needed.

-- 

Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group
Advocate of insourcing at Sun - hire people that care about our company!


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