On Sun, Sep 21, 2003 at 06:35:01PM +0200, Peter Lundqvist (disjunkt) @ Pike (-) developers forum wrote:
Learning proper regexp quoting/syntax seems to be, at least for most people, a real pain. However, quoting is the same everywhere, so once learned it's mostly the same in most languages. Why deviate from this?
Since new syntax (whatever it might be) is an _addition_ and is fully backward-compatible, it will be used only by those who want it. It won't interfere with existing, traditional syntax. So people are free to choose - "good old" syntaxt, or "better new" :)
In case of REs, strings with double quoting looks ugly - just compare
"\([a-z]\+\)" and (say) #`([a-z]+)` - the first is a bit... hmm... needs more time to count back-slashes to understand what is going on :)
There is alternative like ##/re../ where "/" might be anything (like in Perl) and used as delimiter. Tuple ## isn't used anywhere, or?
Regards, /Al