On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 1:43 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
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().
I'd say the lack of diagnostics when they "fail" is the biggest issue. I could easily spend half an hour trying random permutations of a pattern before I figure out why the original didn't work... and I've had a moderate amount of experience. -- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus