On 2005-10-14 at 16:25+0200 Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote: > On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 04:20:24PM +0200, > Wolfgang Jeltsch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > a message of 23 lines which said: > > > By the way, it should be possible to handle regular expressions in > > an Haskell-like way. > > If you like so, but as one more possibility, not as the only way. > > > I always couldn't understand why one has to write regular > > expressions as strings > > Because the language used inside these strings is standard, > multi-language, widely used and documented?
10,000 lemmings can't be wrong? Using strings for regexps is a disaster. Not even the syntax of such regexps is checked at compile time. (This was part of the point of my April 1st "joke" by the way). The language would certainly benefit from the inclusion of regexps the way Wolfgang suggested, but if we really need the short-form syntax (I'm not convinced; it seems pretty much a write only notation), then do it by having special syntax as a shorthand for the proper Haskell. Since Unicode is increasingly adopted, we could just use «regexp» and specify some rules to convert the regexp into Haskell, as "..." is meant to stand for '.':'.':'.':[]. Jón -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
