Re: Regexps (was Re: Invalid Operating System)

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Regexps (was Re: Invalid Operating System)
Date: 16:52 on 18 Dec 2006
> Once complex structures appear in a language, it takes a trained eye to see
> to real meaning, and replacing metacharacters or tokens with written words
> does NOT easy that concept. It just makes you have to read more.

But replacing small groups of metacharacters and words with single
metacharacters whose meanings vary radically and in contradictory ways
depending on context DOES make the job harder.

That's why even in a language like Forth, where the only syntactically
meaningful token is the space, conventions about the meaning of combinations
of tokens are applied consistently and where they aren't that's considered a
bad thing.

In Forth, a "?" at the beginning of a word can be expected to mean that
the word produces a boolean result. If it doesn't, the language standard
does not forbid retaliation against the developer involved.

In Perl, a "/" may be an operator or a literal terminator. That would
be like making +" the string concatenation operator in C. In any other
language you'd be laughed out of the standards committee for proposing
such a thing. Perl hackers violently defend it.

There's stuff above here

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