On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> wrote:
I disagree. Fully general string pattern matching has a few fundamental operations: sequence, alternation, and repetition.
I agree that the fundamental operations are simple in principle. However, I still believe that the elaboration of those operations into fully general pattern matching is a complex combinatorial operation that is difficult to master. regex's certainly make it harder than it needs to be, but anything with similar expressive power is still going to be tricky to completely wrap your head around. Cheers, Nick. P.S. I'm guessing this is the Icon based library you mentioned in the original message: http://www.wilmott.ca/python/patternmatching.html Certainly an interesting read. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia