Re: english names for symbolic SREs

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 8:33 AM, Kevin Wortman <kwortman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 11/27/2013 02:32 PM, Alex Shinn wrote:
> I repeat, if the only reason people want this is because
> they think someone _else_ might want it, it's just cluttering
> the spec.

I prefer the long names. I use regular expressions sparingly, so I've
never internalized the meaning of the symbols, so I can only read REs by
looking up the meaning of each individual symbol, which is tedious, so I
would rather be able to write REs with self-explanatory operators, even
at the cost of verbosity.

Thanks Kevin, the long names will be included.

One final thing, do people prefer the 'non-greedy-' prefix

or the 'lazy-' prefix?  What's actually happening is that in

submatches which include the repetition, the semantics

will switch from leftmost-longest match to leftmost-shortest,

As far as I can tell "non-greedy" is a more common description,

and I initially avoided "lazy" because it might be confused

with lazy evaluation.  Java apparently calls them "reluctant."

But lazy is the shortest.

-- 

Alex