On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 06:04:10PM -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
> Well, other languages have explored that option, and I think that makes
> for an unnatural interface. If you think of regexes as part of a
> larger language, you really want them to be as incestuous as possible,
> just as any other part of the language is incestuous with the rest of
> the language. That's part of what I mean when I say that I'm trying to
> look at regular expressions as just a strange variant of Perl code.
>
> Looking at it from a slightly different angle, regular expressions are
> in great part control syntax, and library interfaces are lousy at
> implementing control.
Right. Having the regex opcodes be perl opcodes will certainly make
implementing (?{ ... }) much easier and probably faster too.
Also re references that we have now will become similar to subroutines
for pattern matching.
I think there are a lot of benefits to the re engine not to be
separate from the core perl ops.
Graham.
