* demerphq <[email protected]> [2006-12-17 19:10]:
> On 12/17/06, A. Pagaltzis <[email protected]> wrote:
> >Regular expressions are a language in their own right; they
> >should at least have their own kind of literal. Even Perl 5 is
> >not consistent enough in this regard.
>
> Got an example?
In the culture of computing, regex languages are mostly
considered second-class citizens, or worse. "Real" languages
like C and C++ will exploit regexes, but only through
a strict policy of apartheid. Regular expressions are our
servants or slaves; we tell them what to do, they go and do
it, and then they come back to say whether they succeeded or
not.
[...]
Coming from a C background, Perl has historically treated
regexes as servants. True, Perl has treated them as trusted
servants, letting them move about in Perl society better than
any other C-like language to date. [...] We need to empower
regexes with a sense of control (structure). It needs to be
just as easy for a regex to call Perl code as it is for Perl
code to call a regex.
---Larry Wall, Apocalypse 5
Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
