On 09/01/2010 02:51 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:
Who knows... POSIX may allow this new behavior, someday.
Wouldn't you adjust sed if POSIX were to permit special
handling of obviously-erroneous regular expressions?
Permit, I don't know. Mandate, of course. In any case, I don't want to
lead the way.
It's a huge mistake, because making it an error means
changing the regex grammar (and making it unnecessarily complicated
and contrived).
It's already done in grep, and wasn't a very big change.
You're conflating the formal grammar and the code that implements it.
The latter is allowed to include this kind of "hack", the former cannot.
POSIX
> I still think this is wrong, and doubly wrong because I cannot disable
> it on my system without breaking it with POSIXLY_CORRECT. Please,
You want to disable it?
I doubt you intend to use grep '[:space:]'...,
so I still fail to understand why you would want that.
Just because I value the difference between "syntactic validation"
(errors) and "semantic validation" (warnings). Call me a purist. :)
It sounds like you're upset.
Sorry it's come to that, but I feel strongly about this, too.
I'm not upset, but I'm very much worried of making a mistake. What if
someone proposes to warn for [A-Z] and [a-z] whenever they're not going
to do what the user thinks (they're not synonyms of any of [[:upper:]],
[[:lower:]], [[:alpha:]])? Are we going to make that an error?
Also, I'm trying to mediate though between our positions. What's wrong
with the alternative plan I outlined? Actually I'm more upset because
you didn't answer that part. :)
Paolo
