> On Aug 10, 2017, at 11:48 AM, Tino Heth via swift-evolution > <[email protected]> wrote: > > I guess everyone agrees that there should be support for regular expressions > - I'm just not sure where, how and when to integrate it… > People seem to have a (sometimes unhealthy…) passion for regex, so I'd like > to encourage a critical look on their importance. > For example, I don't think they belong into the stdlib — there are more basic > (and much more simple) things like a Result-type or an operator for function > concatenation which are not included, so why should we treat regular > expressions differently? > But It doesn't look like we'll see a fitting library that's bundled with > Swift anytime soon, and third-party regex Frameworks imho would cause big > confusion.
This goes back to the idea of “non-standard libraries” that ship with Swift, but aren’t imported by default. I think a “Swift.Regex” module would be awesome, but I agree that it probably doesn’t need to be in the standard library. Dave > > Anyways, as you suggest a special syntax, it would be required to integrate > support into Swift itself… although this is even deeper than the stdlib, I'm > more positive towards that direction, as it would allow some neat tricks: > The expressions could not only be checked, but also translated at compile > time — which could give Swift a real kickstart to beat established solutions > in terms of execution speed. > It would, on the other hand, not work for non-literal strings, so regular > expressions that are created at runtime would still need extra support… > > If Core would consider to include compile-time regular expressions in the > future, I'd support adding the new syntax, even if it's only used like > NSExpression in the first implementation. Without that option, I think it's > not worth it, and I'd rather try to use custom operators to build matchers > that don't follow any regex standard, but are fast and safe to use. > _______________________________________________ > swift-evolution mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list [email protected] https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
