Re: Latest proposal for smart regexes in RELAX NG

[email protected] Thu, 6 May 2004 14:02:41 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.text.xml.relaxng.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
David Tolpin scripsit:

> This is just an example of bad use of regular expressions, nothing
> else. 

Not at all.  It's a regex for matching RFC 822 valid email
addresses.  And of course I cheated: he built it up out of
smaller pieces.  The actual Perl code that does the work is at
http://public.yahoo.com/~jfriedl/regex/email-opt.pl .

> Besides, it is just one more proof that string regular expressions
> is a powerful tool, not every language can make a statement like
> this.

But, of course, it's neither intelligible nor debuggable.

> And in normal use of Unicode regexps, please. Let's which
> one will be shorter and easier to use. 

The point is that string regexes are so difficult that we can't in
practice make more than trivial use of them.  That sacrifices their
great power.

-- 
There are three kinds of people in the world:   John Cowan
those who can count,                            http://www.reutershealth.com
and those who can't.                            [email protected]