On Mar 01, 2016, at 04:37 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Are regexps sufficiently slow that *always* using a regexp would hurt performance?[1] The model I really had in mind was to always use regexps, and have a flag in the UI (Postorius) to regexp-quote when the user wants a literal.
I think it's less about performance and more about being explicit. My own sense is that literals are more common than regexps, and that in general regexps are more difficult to understand, but I don't have a lot of data points to back that up.
Or we could continue to have the core representation be "leading '^' iff regexp", and once again have Postorius prepend "^.*" or whatever.
In which case, the core's model wouldn't have to change, right?
I really want to avoid regexp-quoted strings for literals in the model. I'm fine if the core model doesn't change but Postorius makes things nicer for the user.
Cheers, -Barry