On 12/17/06, Robert Rothenberg <[email protected]> wrote:
On 17/12/06 08:52 Dave Hodgkinson wrote:
> Reach for the root cause: regexps themselves are hateful. Nasy,
> cryptic line noise.
As has been said in another message, regexps are their own language, which
has origins in theoretical computer science and mathematics. Like most
expressions in mathematics and logic, it looks like "nas[t]y cryptic line
noice," but it makes sense to those who know how to read it, and it's the
most efficient means of expressing the concept.
I rather like that many languages and applications have some form regexps,
so that I do not have to (re)learn a new way of doing the same thing.
I rather hate that I do have to learn annoying (and inconsistent)
differences between regexp implementations in different applications, for
example, Perl vs Emacs regexps.
Well, the two come from different eras so its hardly surprising that
they dont match. I mean you'd find it hard to read English from the
15th century, and someone from the 15th century would have the same
troubles reading modern English.
To me using the ancient regexp syntax that emacs uses is about as
sensible as it would be to provide all the config and help pages in
15th century English.
Yves
--
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"
