S. Fisher wrote:
Regular expressions are used by vi and emacs; in fact, any editor that
doesn't let you do a regex search is a joke. (Even some microsoft
applications understand regexes.) So everyone who programs should
learn regular expressions.
Regular expressions are also used by grep, and by the languages awk,
Ruby, Perl, etc. Every programmer should know how to use at least
one of these languages. Those who don't should perhaps be lumped
together with COBOL programmers.
Therefore, I honestly believe that anyone who doesn't understand
regular expressions has a huge, glaring, inexcusable hole in his
computer knowledge. Ignorance of regular expressions is like not
knowing how to tie one's shoelaces: it's not something to boast about.
I have been programming professionally for 18 years, in roughly 10
different languages, including assembler. I have never once written a
program with vi or emacs, nor have I ever programmed in awk, Ruby or
Perl. Or COBOL, for that matter. Does that make me somehow unprofessional?
> '\G\s*"([^"]*(?:""[^"]*)*)"\s*,|\G([^,"]*),'
Claiming a line of gibberish like that given above is either readable or
maintainable is the real joke. Adding all the pages of code to parse
gibberish like that above, to be able to handle 40,000 different
possible text formats, when all you need is to handle simple CSV files,
is also a joke.
Jeff.
--
I haven't smoked for 1 year, 2 months and 3 weeks,
saving $2,035.90 and not smoking 13,572.71 cigarettes.
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