July 30, 2001
10:12 p.m.
Thomas Wouters writes:
Also, the Perl engine has some features SRE hasn't, yet, and vice versa (last I checked, Perl's regexps didn't do unicode or named groups.)
Perl's REs now do Unicode. Perl 6's REs will do named groups.
And I won't even start with Perl's more archaic features, that change the whole working of the interpreter.
Those are going away. Perl people hate them as much as you do--the only time they're used now is to make deliberately hideous code, and hardly anyone will seriously lament the passing of that ability. No more "change the starting position for subscripts", no more "change all RE matches globally", and so on. Nat