Carl Johnson writes:
the famed saying of Jamie Zawinski ("Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.") is not highly motivating. :-D
Jamie was talking about the "to a man with a hammer, all problems look like thumbs" phenomenon. I've never heard anybody complain that shell globs are complex. But regexps will take you a lot farther with just character classes [] (which most modern shells implement), the wildcard character . (usually ? in shells), and the repetition operators * and/or + (available only as a variable-length wildcard * in shell globs).
In fact, I personally would like to deprecate the with-argument implementation of string.split(), ....
Would that work for you?
Wouldn't that subtly break the code of everyone who has written something like:
Indeed it would. That was not a serious proposal. At this point, I'm trying to understand the resistence to regexps, not propose an improvement for .split().