RE strings (was: Variable Interpolation - status of PEP 215)

[Peter Hansen]

Daniel Dittmar wrote:
> 
> > Cimarron Taylor wrote:
> >>   m = re'^EMP:([^,]*),([^,]*),([^,]*),([^,]*)$'.match(line)
> >>   if m:
> >>         ...
> >>
> >> is much clearer and more maintainable than
> Peter Hansen replied:
> > Given that the only real difference is you skip an import, and
> > at the cost of modifying the language definition in an unusual
> > manner, is there any point to this at all?
> 
> The implementation could choose to cache the result of re.compile at module
> level, thus
> - speeding up the 'naive' re usage
> - freeing the programmer from doing the caching in code

Any reason the re.match() method could not do the same, internally?

> I'm still against it, the road to Perl is paved with syntax extensions.

:-)

-Peter