Re: english names for symbolic SREs

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 6:27 AM, Peter Bex <Peter.Bex@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 01:13:31PM -0800, Michael Montague wrote:
> Briefly looking through the first 16 or so implementations listed on
> http://trac.sacrideo.us/wg/wiki/SchemeImplementationReleases, it
> appeared to me that only Chicken and Chibi provide SRE regular
> expressions.

What about the original SCSH?  And there's an attempt at re-porting
SCSH to plain Scheme48, and a port of SCSH to Guile.  Finally,
Irregex and this SRFI's reference implementation are portable
implementations which work ~everywhere.

IrRegex is also used in the default Jazz and Mosh

installations at least, and likely other places I'm unaware of.

Since the SRE syntax is exposed to non-programmers (as

search patterns in editors, etc.), and could be stored in data

and config files (I know I have some of these) we should be

more reluctant to change it than the API names.  We can

still consider changing the SRE syntax, I just want a very

good reason, and I haven't seen any.

IMHO * and + are very common patterns which deserve a

short name, even if it takes new users slightly longer to learn

them.

In your proposal you introduce "lazy" without defining it -

I'm guessing you mean what is already called "non-greedy".

-- 

Alex