> What I think you're looking for is the fact that they're not regexes any more. They
> are > "rexen", but in horrifying-secret-reality, what has happened is that Larry's
> decided
> to move Fortran out of core, and replace it with yacc.
just an aside, and a bit off-topic, but has anybody considered hijacking the regular
expression engine in perl6 and turning it into its opposite, namely making
*productions*
of strings/sounds/whatever that could possibly match the regular expression? ie:
a*
producing
''
a
aa
aaa
aaaa
etc.
I could think of lots of uses for this:
1) test data for databases and programs.
2) input for genetic algorithms/code generators
3) semantic rules/production of random sentences.
In fact, I foresee a combo of 2,3 and some expert system somewhere producing the first
sentient perl program. ;-)
Ed
(
ps: As for the 'rexen' concept of matching stuff other than characters, hell, that's a
*wonderful* idea. And if you turned the regex around so that you could (in a
meaningful
way) make productions from it for stuff other than characters, you could make random
http requests, music, GUI requests/interactions database connections and so forth.
Its a code testers' dream...
Now, just got to think of the syntax for it.. how to make it usable.
)
