> On Jan 1, 2016, at 4:44 PM, John Joyce via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> It is also probably worth burning first-class language support for regexes.  
>> This would allow specifying variable captures inline in the pattern, would 
>> allow flexible syntax for defining regexes, support powerful extensions to 
>> the base regex model (e.g. Perl 6 style), and would provide better 
>> compile-time checking and error recovery for mistakes.
>> 
>> -Chris
> I know this is an old thread already, but this sure would be one of the major 
> breakout pieces of functionality.
> If Swift had native regular expressions, without all the noise you see in the 
> Objective-C API that exposes ICU regular expressions, the adoption rate would 
> be huge.
> If they were *truly* native, as in somebody sat down and built an NFA (or one 
> of the fancier approaches that mixes with DFA) state machine, Swift's 
> best-in-class Unicode support would and could result in amazing things.
> It'd boost the scripting use of Swift tremendously and seal the deal as a 
> server side language.

Totally agreed.  switch on a string with a bunch of regexes being matched 
should turn into a parallel state machine, just like a lexer :-)

-Chris

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