Regex niceties for the parser (was Re: To get things started...)

At 05:17 PM 11/27/00 +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> > >>>>> "ST" == Sam Tregar <[email protected]> writes:
> > ST> Perhaps we really need a new kind of regex that works by-design against
> > ST> streams of bytes?
>
>I don't think any change is needed in the regex syntax. I think just being
>careful to use minimal matching whenever possible should be sufficient.

What we could use, though, is a way to specify weighted alternatives in 
regexes, so we could have a single regex look for multiple things at once 
and match the one we'd prefer if there are alternatives. I don't even 
really care if we can't do it inside a regex specification itself and need 
to do odd things with regex objects.

Yeah, I know we can do this with alternations and such, but that can get 
really messy when we're pasting a half-zillion regexes together.

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
[email protected]                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk