On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 11:17 AM, J.R. Mauro<jrm8...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 6:57 AM, roger peppe<rogpe...@gmail.com> wrote: >> you need (.|\n) instead of . >> >> sam originally used @ as a "match everything" character >> but it was removed, presumably because it was rarely used. > > That's a stupid reason to remove a good feature. By that token, maybe > we should remove structural regular expressions since they're "rarely > used" and just go back to using ed.
Indeed, but it's an excellent reason to remove a bad feature. @ was a bad feature. It was hard to use well because @* or @+ would consume the whole file. Plus it was barely a feature, just a convenience entirely equivalent to (.|\n), which, by the way, you almost never see. It went in when we didn't yet know how the all-one-string model of sam would turn out. It turned out just fine and didn't need the @ feature, so out it went. After several years went by without my using it once, while @ simultaneously became useful as a real character so annoying as a metacharacter, out it went. Deletion is the greatest tool of software design. -rob
