This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 115 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 115 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
On 11/27/2013 7:37 AM, John Cowan wrote:
> Alex Shinn scripsit:
>
>> It was John who insisted that the names be added, and John
>> who came up with most of the new names, so I'm assuming
>> he genuinely wants them.
> I do, though I didn't come up with the idea and in fact was initially
> against having more than one way to do it, but you convinced me otherwise.
> I think the long names are more self-documenting, more Schemey, and
> will make SREs more accessible to people who find string REs an
> abomination of the outer darkness.
Hypothetically, lets say that this SRFI specifies a new regular
_expression_ syntax called NRE. It should be straightforward to transform
SREs into NREs. The existing SRE implementations (IrRegex and SCSH) can
provide a procedure sre->nre which people with existing SREs can use and
their code is not gratuitously left behind.
The problem with providing both short names and long names is that when
I write SREs I can just use the long names, but when I read other
peoples SREs, then I potentially still need to know both.