On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 01:47:37PM +0200, Sven Guckes wrote:
> > Is this too ambitious a wish?
>
> unfortunately, yes.
Ricardo SIGNES is a man of vision, I think. If it is practical to link
in a preferred regex suite, as described in his post on this thread, to
allow the ERE-proficient amongst us to escape the frustrations and
limitations of BREs, then my only questions are:
o Do I have to dust off my rusty but revivable 'C' skills to help get
this moving?
o Should vim be fixed first? 'cos I think Roman is definitely right.
(There's still no magic that allows "+" in lieu of "\+")
> let's assume you could make this change within a day.
> how many setup files, scripts, shell aliases etc
> would have to be adjusted? can you give this service?
As Ricardo implies, let's not change any. It would require that
people change, and I recognise that it is only in accepting the existing
tower of babel, that we have any hope of providing a simpler consistent
interface for those who prefer it.
> besides, would everyone gain from this?
Oh-oh, is this devil's advocacy?
Whether it is:
o The time lost by countless users individually clawing their way up the
learning curve of a panoply of regex dialects, just to do a simple
job.
o The countless hours spent by worthy individuals reinventing the wheel
for their otherwise great tool. (When the time could be spent on
features which help users.)
o The resulting bugs, fixes, and re-releases of these tools, impacting
both developer and user.
o The newsgroup and mailing list traffic due to regex knowledge already
acquired not being portable. (Much energy has also been expended on
the procmail mailling list, examining how their dialect can be made
stranger still, as various deficiencies of the older syntax are
addressed.)
o The confusion sown by inconsistency. Beginner pain is exacerbated by
behavioural variability. Lessons learned on one dialect must be
unlearned on others. (After approximately a decade, I still send
stuff to grep, rather than use vim's irregular expressions.)
there is benefit enough for all.
For what it is worth, dissatisfaction with dialects has found its way
into the debian regex(7) manpage. It describes POSIX 1003.2 EREs as
"modern", and is not very flattering of BREs:
>>>
Obsolete (``basic'') regular expressions differ in several
respects. `|', `+', and `?' are ordinary characters and
there is no equivalent for their functionality.
<<<
and
>>>
Obsolete REs mostly exist for backward compatibility in some old
programs;
<<<
(No, they can't mean vim. It has the backslash work-around, even
though it doesn't have modern EREs. ;-)
Hmmm. Whither mutt?
Regards,
Erik
--
_,-_|\ Erik Christiansen
/ \ Research & Development Division
\_,-.__/ Voice Products Department
v NEC Business Solutions Pty. Ltd.
