At 1:12 PM -0400 2006-05-24, Barry Warsaw wrote:
I have a hard time imagining that anyone would enter
one two three
and not expect it to match 'one|two|three', so I think I'd opt for 1.
That's what I would have expected, and I was very surprised to hear Mark's explanation that this didn't actually happen.
I'm not in favor of yet another configuration variable to control this. OTOH, I've never really received much feedback on the whole topics features (thus the dearth of responses to your question ;) so I don't really have a good sense of how people are using this, if they are at all.
I think the concept is a good one, and on busy lists I would gladly subscribe to a few topics and leave the rest, but I think it needs some additional work before we can get to the point where I'd actually use it. For one thing, you need a way of explicitly selecting the null topic.
I'm not sure the verbose interpretation of the text box is the most useful. The other option is to use some special prefix character at the front of the regexp to indicate whether it should be verbose or not. It would have to be something that is impossible in the first position, and it seems like | would be a good choice. Thus if | were in the first position, you'd interpret that to mean each line should be joined with | but if not, then you interpret the entire regexp as a verbose pattern.
Not understanding what a "verbose pattern" is, I'm not really fully understanding this concept.
I can say that I think it would be pretty wild to come across a new twist in variable regexps like this, after twenty or so years of mucking about with Unix, etc....
-- Brad Knowles, brad@stop.mail-abuse.org
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755LOPSA member since December 2005. See http://www.lopsa.org/.