>On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Tom Christiansen wrote:
>> >As for special-case rules, I believe that my proposed modification would
>> >REMOVE a special-case semantic rule, at the cost of added complexity at the
>> >implementation level.
>>
>> What is this alleged "special-case rule" you are talking about?
>> There is no such thing. None. When you write /pat/, it means to
>> find the first such pattern. There is no special case here.
>The special case is "as long as it has the earliest starting position".
>There may be many, many possible matches for a regexp in a given string,
>especially with an expression as inclusive as ".*".
You want to change things from "find a match", which has the obviously
deterministic semantics of finding the first match, and alter that
to mean "find all possible matches; now, amongst those...". This
is much more complicated, at many levels.
You have yet to address my long mail to you.
You have yet to read MRE.
>So, you have to apply some disambiguating rules to identify which matches
>are "interesting" enough to be worth paying attention to.
There is no ambiguity. Short-circuiting it not ambiguity. Stopping when
you have an answer is not ambiguity. You are mistaken.
--tom
