On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 2:14 PM, John Holdsworth via swift-evolution < swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
> I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t tied this proposal so strongly to regular > expressions! > It is indeed the wrong motivation. Even as a ten year veteran of Perl > development > I’m not sure we want to bake it into the language quite so tightly (isn’t > a part of > Foundation?) What would /regex/ represent - an instance of > NSRegularExpression? > Would the flags be pattern options or matching options? This is a whole > other debate. > > For me the focus of raw strings was a sort of super-literal literal which > has many > applications. The r”literal” syntax has a precedent in Python and there > seemed > to be a syntactic gap that could be occupied but perhaps there are other > alternatives > we could discuss. It would be a shame to see ‘quoted strings’ be used for > this however. > I still live in hope one day it will be used for single character UNICODE > values. > > Since what passes for a single character changes by Unicode revision--such as whenever they get around to enumerating the permitted modifying attributes of the poop emoji--it is quite impossible (and Swift's `Character` doesn't attempt to) to enforce single-characterness at compile time. We should put any such notions to rest up front. > On 23 Nov 2017, at 19:10, Brent Royal-Gordon <br...@architechies.com> > wrote: > > On Nov 23, 2017, at 11:15 AM, Chris Lattner via swift-evolution < > swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote: > > Until we figure out that path forward for regex’s, I think they aren’t the > right motivation for this proposal. > > > 1. Even in our shining pattern matching future—a future which I, for one, > am eager to hasten—we will still need to interoperate with > NSRegularExpression and other Perl 5-compatible regex engines. > > 2. Code generation. > > 3. Windows-style paths. > > 4. Doesn’t LaTeX use backslashes? > > 5. Etc. > > I think the Motivation section undersells this proposal. Regexes are a > strong short-run use case, but in the long run, we’ll need this for other > things. In both cases, though, raw literals will be a useful addition to > the language, improving the clarity of Swift code much like multiline > literals already have. > > -- > Brent Royal-Gordon > Sent from my iPhone > > > > _______________________________________________ > swift-evolution mailing list > swift-evolution@swift.org > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution > >
_______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list swift-evolution@swift.org https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution