Re: regexp matching in svn?

[Branko Cibej]
> It'd certainly be better to somehow get regular expressions included
> in APR.

The only problem there (aside from the apr 1.0 feature freeze you
mentioned) is that there are so many flavors of RE out there (Emacs,
Perl/PCRE/C#, POSIX Basic, POSIX Extended, and one or two others) that
it sounds like a giant bikeshed to be painted. That, or they'd try to
support _all_ variants, with switch flags, and end up with a huge mess.

> We did fairly well without requiring regular expressions before
> ... and regex's are a bit of a temptation since the look like an
> all-purpose hammer, and many problems that could be solved without
> them suddenly depend on regular expressions. :)

OTOH, we _did_ stop using XML for wc metadata around 1.3 or 1.4.
Surely XML is an "all-purpose hammer" too. (:

You're right about the temptation, of course. In Perl, most
programmers use far more RE matches than strictly required to solve
their problems, since RE matching has such simple, convenient syntax.
Received on 2012-01-28 22:09:32 CET