[Python-ideas] This seems like a wart to me...

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

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().