Re: Erlang re docs

Lloyd R. Prentice <[email protected]> ezt írta (időpont: 2021.
jan. 30., Szo, 18:43):
[...]
> My guess, Dieter, is that the re doc works for you because you already have enough knowledge and experience to understand, say, when, where, and why you would want to compile a Regexp or run a (Subject, re). So, you scan down and see compile/1 and your needs are met. But you did have to scan down through some 14 blocks of dense text to find compile/1|2.

I don't. On the https://erlang.org/doc/search/ page I can select the
function name from the menu on the left hand side.

> But— given your need to refresh your memory about use of the compile/1|2 functions, did you really need to scan over the second and third paragraphs under Description? Maybe these should be a footnote.

Actually those paragraphs are information for newbies like you. For
refreshing information (or just checking exactly how that option is
called) it's very easy to scan over those.

> As one who comes to Erlang re with less experience— I’m totally baffled by compile/1, inspect/2, and run/2|3. What in the world are they? How can they be useful to me? I can kind of sus replace/3|4 and split/2|3, but geez man, all that fine print is brain numbing.  And most of the text from Perl-Like Regular Expression Syntax on down looks to me like a tutorial and densely written at that. Do I really need to know that stuff to program, say, an Erlang markdown interpreter?

Well, regular expressions can be complicated beasts. For those coming
from UNIX/Linux background, basic understanding of regular expressions
(as used by tools like grep, sed, vi) is given. I actually like that
the Erlang documentation doesn't punt the problem away with a link to
some other page about regular expressions, but includes a description,
especially because the regular expressions used by different tools and
programming environments are really similar, but do have their
differences. I believe Markdown grammar is not a Chomsky type-3
grammar, so you won't be able to parse Markdown purely by regular
expressions.