perl6-language-regex
Summary report 20000920
Mark-Jason Dominus has relinquished the wg chair due to the pressure
of other commitments; I'll be taking over the chair for the short
time remaining. Thanks to Mark-Jason for all his hard work.
I'll be contacting the authors of all outstanding RFCs shortly to
encourage them to work towards freezing them as soon as practical.
Hugo
RFC 72: The regexp engine should go backward as well as
forward. (Peter Heslin)
Peter says (edited):
:If the regexp code is unlikely to be rewritten from the ground up, then
:there may be little chance of this feature being implemented. I'll make
:a pitch for it anyway at the end of my talk at YAPC::Europe, and then
:I'll freeze the RFC.
RFC 93: Regex: Support for incremental pattern matching (Damian Conway)
Now frozen at v3 with no changes; I don't think there was a v2.
RFC 110: counting matches (Richard Proctor)
Richard added my suggestions about the interaction between /t, /g
and \G, and froze the RFC soon after.
RFC 112: Assignment within a regex (Richard Proctor)
No discussion.
RFC 138: Eliminate =~ operator. (Steve Fink)
Withdrawn.
RFC 144: Behavior of empty regex should be simple (Mark Dominus)
Frozen.
RFC 145: Brace-matching for Perl Regular Expressions (Eric Roode)
No discussion directly about this RFC. The discussion of XML/HTML-
-specific extensions continued for a short while, but has not
resulted in an RFC.
The closest we have to an emerging consensus appears to be that
it is very difficult to pin down a precise problem to solve - the
areas in which we want to match pairs of delimiters (such as
numeric expressions, C code, perl code, HTML and XML) each seem
to require a variety of special cases, each different from the
other.
RFC 150: Extend regex syntax to provide for return of a hash of
matched subpatterns (Kevin Walker)
One suggestion from me of (?\%key) for backreferencing, but no
substantive discussion.
RFC 158: Regular Expression Special Variables (Uri Guttman)
No discussion.
RFC 164: Replace =~, !~, m//, s///, and tr// with match(), subst(),
and trade() (Nathan Wiger)
This RFC has now been frozen; the frozen version included some
rewording and a couple of additional explanatory notes, as well
as introducing a typo ('$gotis') in an example.
RFC 165: Allow variables in tr/// (Richard Proctor)
Surprisingly, no discussion.
RFC 166: Alternative lists and quoting of things (Richard Proctor)
New version, with a new name (was 'Additions to regexs'). This RFC
is not currently available from the archive due to a misfiling, but
you'll find it here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-language-regex@perl.org/msg00350.html
This removes two of the three original suggestions, and expands on
the remaining one. Mark-Jason pointed out that the (new) extension
to (?\Q$foo) is not needed.
RFC 170: Generalize =~ to a special-purpose assignment operator
(Nathan Wiger)
Now frozen, with some modifications.
RFC 197: Numberic Value Ranges In Regular Expressions (David Nichol)
No discussion.
RFC 198: Boolean Regexes (Richard Proctor)
No discussion.
New RFCS
Of the other discussions that may still spawn a new RFC, most have been
mentioned previously. One new one: Tom Christiansen has asked '[w]hat
can be done to make $ work "better", so we don't have to make people
use /foo\z/ to mean /foo$/'.
