* Steven D'Aprano:
For some reason, people seem to have the idea that pattern matching of
strings must be a single expression, no matter how complicated the
pattern they're trying to match. If we have a complicated task to do in
almost any other field, we don't hesitate to write a function to do it,
or even multiple functions: we break our code up into small,
understandable, testable pieces. We recognise that a five-line function
may very well be less complex than a one-line expression that does the
same thing. But if it's a string pattern matching task, we somehow become
resistant to the idea of writing a function and treat one-line
expressions as "simpler", no matter how convoluted they become.
It's as if we decided that every maths problem had to be solved by a
single expression, no matter how complex, and invented a painfully terse
language unrelated to normal maths syntax for doing so:
# Calculate the roots of sin**2(3*x-y):
result = me.compile("{^g.?+*y:h}|\Y^r&(?P:2+)|\w+(x&y)|[?#\s]").solve()
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
Cheers,
- Alf
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