On Sat, Sep 08, 2007 at 12:12:10AM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: : On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 03:50:09PM -0700, Larry Wall wrote: : > I dunno, maybe <\ws> isn't so bad... : : But as soon as I saw it I thought the same as you say in the paragraph above - : in the context of a regexp (or string) \ makes me think that one character is : being back-whacked, rather than it applying to the entire token. : : I suspect my brain will think of rules like regexps. (But I could be wrong, : and unlike quite a few people on this list, I've not written any yet, so my : opinion might be of little value)
Well, we could go off in a TeXish direction and say that \foo is a non-capturing <foo>, and \w, \d, etc. are just <w>, <d>, etc. Then your whitespace is just \ws, and your word boundary is just \wb. That would simplify how you define your own \w sequences as well. \xfe gets a little problematic under that view though, unless we require all rules starting with x to be called <xfeefiefoefoo>. Or require people to use \x[fe], which also kinda sux. Larry
