For any significant language feature (take recursion for example) there are these issues:
1. Ease of reading/skimming (other's) code 2. Ease of writing/designing one's own 3. Learning curve 4. Costs/payoffs (eg efficiency, succinctness) of use 5. Debug-ability I'll start with 3. When someone of Kernighan's calibre (thanks for the link BTW) says that he found recursion difficult it could mean either that Kernighan is a stupid guy -- unlikely considering his other achievements. Or that C is not optimal (as compared to lisp say) for learning recursion. Evidently for syntactic, implementation and cultural reasons, Perl programmers are likely to get (and then overuse) regexes faster than python programmers. 1 is related but not the same as 3. Someone with courses in automata, compilers etc -- standard CS stuff -- is unlikely to find regexes a problem. Conversely an intelligent programmer without a CS background may find them more forbidding. On Jun 6, 12:11 pm, Chris Torek <nos...@torek.net> wrote: > > >On 06/03/2011 08:05 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > >> If regexes were more readable, as proposed by Wall, that would go > >> a long way to reducing my suspicion of them. > > "Suspicion" seems like an odd term here. When I was in school my mother warned me that in college I would have to undergo a most terrifying course called 'calculus'. Steven's 'suspicions' make me recall my mother's warning :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
