On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 04:10:12PM -0500, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
> The crux of the problem is that non-greedy qualifiers don't affect the
> "earliest match" behavior, which makes the matches more greedy than they
> really ought to be.
Right. We've got a terminoligy issue. There's two axes here:
Greed: Greedy by default. Will try to match as many chars after its
starting point as possible. Non-greedy will try to match as few chars after
its starting point as possible, and is denoted by putting a '?' after a
quantifer.
Lazyness: Eager by default. An eager assertation will try to match as early
as possible. It isn't possible to use lazy assertations at present. (Not
simply, anyway. It's probably possible to combine other (?) features to get
the same effect.)
You seem to want the choice between greedy, eager assertations, and
non-greedy, lazy assertations. If you came up with a good way to specify
along both axes, I think we'd have a winner.
-=- James Mastros
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