[Branko Cibej] > It'd certainly be better to somehow get regular expressions included > in APR.
The only problem there (aside from the apr 1.0 feature freeze you mentioned) is that there are so many flavors of RE out there (Emacs, Perl/PCRE/C#, POSIX Basic, POSIX Extended, and one or two others) that it sounds like a giant bikeshed to be painted. That, or they'd try to support _all_ variants, with switch flags, and end up with a huge mess. > We did fairly well without requiring regular expressions before > ... and regex's are a bit of a temptation since the look like an > all-purpose hammer, and many problems that could be solved without > them suddenly depend on regular expressions. :) OTOH, we _did_ stop using XML for wc metadata around 1.3 or 1.4. Surely XML is an "all-purpose hammer" too. (: You're right about the temptation, of course. In Perl, most programmers use far more RE matches than strictly required to solve their problems, since RE matching has such simple, convenient syntax.
