> But I think that anyone not under the influence of psychedelic > substances that has suffered PCR, will agree we don't want to move in > that direction, and even if small, counting is a step in that > direction.
Your feelings are understandable, given the horror of pcre, but in this case they are irrational. pcre is an atrocity for two reasons: (1) it is badly implemented and (2) it changes the family of languages which can be matched by regular expressions. In fact (1) is more or less a consequence of (2). Adding counts would do neither of these, it just makes it a bit easier to and more natural to describe some languages in the class. There are sane objections to adding counts, but I don't think this is really one of them. -- John Stalker School of Mathematics Trinity College Dublin tel +353 1 896 1983 fax +353 1 896 2282
