On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, James Mastros wrote:
> 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:
Not the only terminology issue, but I've addressed that in other messages.
> 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.
I want the maximum level of OVERALL consistency for regular expressions as
a whole, rather than immutable adherence to the "leftmost trumps nongreedy"
rule currently in place. Most of the time, I agree with the precedence of
leftmost over nongreedy. The example I gave is a case where I believe the
strict adherence to the leftmost rule actually introduces complexity and
makes the regular expression system less self-consistent.
I don't know if anyone else will ever believe me or not.
Deven
