Re: Help with regexp

[tomas]

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On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 07:03:02AM +0100, Andreas Politz wrote:
> tomas@tuxteam.de writes:

[...]

> > Wow, Pascal. You have taught this old dog a new trick [...]

[...]

> Since this topic is more or less closed (modulo escaped delimiter), we
> could use it to discuss the question, why using non-trivial Emacs regexp
> makes one feel like Chomsky had just written his influential book on
> grammars.

;-)

> Things I (won't) miss most:
> 
> - extreme backslasheritis

Meaning: backslasheritis of the First Kind (aka |, (, ), {, } not having
special meaning) or backslasheritis of the Second Kind (aka having to
escape backslashes to get them into the string in the first place)?

Mind you, I don't like it either, but any idea I had kills some aspect
of Simplicity we all appreciate in Emacs :-(

> - no short aliases for important constructs :
>   digits,symbol-constituents,newline,space

Well, you always have those pesky [:stuff:] ones. They ain't so tidy,
but once you get used to them they are even more readable (and they
reduce the backslash density considerably).

> - no zero-width matches ; look(ahead|behind)

Hm. To be fair, there are some, among others \b, \B, \<, \> (and the
funky \=, which matches at point). Yor are looking for a general zero
width match?

Regards
- -- tomás
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