On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 05:54:42PM +0200, Roman Neuhauser wrote:
> btw, vim's regex support is completely b0rken IMO. its (no) magic
> switches... weird syntax... ugh.
Given that vim's regexes are based on vi's which are based on ed's,
and ed was the first UNIX program to *have* regexes, it's hardly
fair to call its regex support broken. It just has to be backward-compatible
with a regex flavor that has been superceded, so it uses special escapes.
It's the same reason that modern grep programs, which have features formerly
found only in egrep, use \+ instead of +, \| instead of |, etc.
Meanwhile, the 'magic' stuff was orignally put in vi to make the more common
cases easier for new users, but it has been expanded in vim to the point where
you can set it up to have a fairly modern regex syntax (with fewer backslashes,
etc). Vim may not have modern innovations from Perl 5 like non-capturing
grouping, lookaround, etc., but it's hardly "broken".
--
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[Who has clearly never tried to use a PDP-10. Ed.]
