Would you like a Snobol pattern matcher? (Re: Making regex suck less)

[John Roth]

"Greg Ewing" <see_reply_address at something.invalid> wrote in message
news:3D740DFC.1040009 at something.invalid...
> John Roth wrote:
>
> > http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/06/04/apo5.html
> >
> > http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/08/22/exegesis5.html
>
>
> I just had a brief look at this, and the underlying
> ideas seem to be a lot like the way Snobol patterns
> work.
>
> Maybe it's time for me to resurrect the Snobol-style
> pattern matching module that I started on a while
> back and never got around to releasing.
>
> Would anyone be interested in this? Its
> syntax is similar to that of Plex REs, except that
> the primitives are Snobol-like, and it uses a
> backtracking matching algorithm that's much more
> powerful than a DFA (you can write entire parsers
> in it, for example).

I don't know much about Snobol, unfortunately.
I think my biggest issue here is that we shouldn't
reinvent the wheel unless there is a good reason.
In other words, Larry is taking Perl in a specific
direction. Assuming we want to make major
changes to regex, is there any _good_ reason
for doing something conceptually different and
consequently adding to the cacophony?

John Roth


> --
> Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
> University of Canterbury,
> Christchurch, New Zealand
> http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg
>