[racket-dev] Missing pregexp syntax in Racket

On 2011 Nov 29, at 18:14, Neil Van Dyke wrote:

> 1. Everyone should acknowledge the JWZ quote, "Some people, when 
> confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' 
> Now they have two problems."  Regular expressions are Perl's hammer that 
> makes most problems look like a nail.

What Neil said! 

> 2. Before someone spends too much time putting the finishing touches on 
> old Unix/Perl regular expression syntax, they might want to look at Olin 
> Shivers's SREs.  Sexp-based regular expression syntax can be a big 
> readability win when your regexps get complicated.  
> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/citations.html#sre


What Neil said _and_ what Shivers said!

Implementing Shivers-style SREs would be a much bigger win than any alternate pregexp syntax with differently funky backslash rules from everything else.

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK