On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Glenn Linderman wrote: : Damian Conway wrote: : > For an C<rx> without modifiers, (...) are certainly unambiguous as delimiters. : > So I think they should be allowed. Of course, it's Larry's call and he may : > well prefer the simplicity of a blanket prohibition. : : So one thing that bothers me in the whole discussion of rule vs rx : differences and similarities, is that there was a previous discussion : that said "regular expression" and "regex" should be deprecated terms : because the rules and patterns are no longer regular, but if rx isn't a : short form of regex, what is it a short form of? And if it is a short : form of regex, shouldn't it be deprecated too (respelled)?
I'm enough of a linguist to know that we can tweak what people mean by "regular expression", but there's no way on earth we can stop them from using the term. Ten years from now Friedl's book will still be called "Mastering Regular Expressions", I suspect. So I'm taking a cue from Friedl, and encouraging use of the technical term "regex" as a way to not precisely mean "regular expression". People who want to go further can use the term "rule", at the risk of not being understood outside Perl circles. Larry
