On Mar 23, 2005, at 2:43 PM, Brian Deacon wrote:
I'm not often in regex world, so somebody probably phrased a better version of this observation already.... but I joked with my friend that regex is an example of the signal to noise ratio being too -high-.
Actually, I don't agree. And, it seems, neither do most programmers.
The big problem is that regexes get used when there is weak structure to what you are parsing. When there is weak structure, there is ambiguity. Where there is ambiguity, there is complexity--eg. headers for email.
When you have structure, just about anything will work. XML, s-expressions, grammar parsers, etc.
Anybody know of anything like that?
flex and bison and other things of their ilk (grammar parsers and lexers) would probably be what you describe.
-a
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