> On Jan 23, 2017, at 4:27 PM, Joe Groff via swift-evolution 
> <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 23, 2017, at 2:06 PM, Ben Cohen via swift-evolution 
>> <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jan 23, 2017, at 7:49 AM, Joshua Alvarado <alvaradojosh...@gmail.com 
>>> <mailto:alvaradojosh...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Taken from NSHipster <http://nshipster.com/nsregularexpression/>:
>>> Happily, on one thing we can all agree. In NSRegularExpression, Cocoa has 
>>> the most long-winded and byzantine regular expression interface you’re ever 
>>> likely to come across.
>>> 
>>> There is no way to achieve the goal of being better at string processing 
>>> than Perl without regular expressions being addressed. It just should not 
>>> be ignored. 
>> 
>> 
>> We’re certainly not ignoring the importance of regexes. But if there’s a key 
>> takeaway from your experiences with NSRegularExpression, it’s that a good 
>> regex implementation matters, a lot. That’s why we don’t want to rush one in 
>> alongside the rest of the overhaul of String. Instead, we should take our 
>> time to make it really great, and building on a solid foundation of a good 
>> String API that’s already in place should help ensure that.
> 
> I do think that there's some danger to focusing too narrowly on regular 
> expressions as they appear in languages today. I think the industry has 
> largely moved on to fully-structured formats that require proper parsing 
> beyond what traditional regexes can handle. The decades of experience with 
> Perl shows that making regexes too easy to use without an easy ramp up to 
> more sophisticated string processing leads to people cutting corners trying 
> to make regex-based designs kind-of work. The Perl 6 folks recognized this 
> and developed their "regular expression" support into something that 
> supported arbitrary grammars; I think we'd do well to start at that level by 
> looking at what they've done.

Big +1 to this, which is why I fully support deferring this to the future.  
Let’s wait until we can devote the attention required to do it right.

> 
> -Joe
> 
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