regular expressions

[Jon]

Marielle:

My personal reaction to statements like "of course it is very easy to 
make errors and quite difficult to keep track of what you are effectively
doing" leaves me pretty much uninterested.  Some of us do well with 
terse and complex languages.  I'm on the other end, wanting visual 
clarity during coding, as a means towards more reliable code.

Jon


Marielle Lange wrote:

>>Nobody *likes* RegEx. But it is powerful, and we use it because there
>>is no practical alternative. I wish there were.
>>    
>>
>
>Hi Dave,
>
>I do like regEx very much. Simply because that's the optimal solution to the
>problem they address. That's an extraordinarily clever solution, which let you
>write in a single line, what could take you pages of programs to code. Thanks
>to regular expressions, I wrote in less than 20 lines the equivalent of a
>program that a colleague of mine had written in nearly 10 pages.
>
>Of course, the learning curve is very very slow... of course it is very easy to
>make errors and quite difficult to keep track of what you are effectively
>doing.  My approach is to test my regEx in editors like BBedit (mac) or notetab
>(pc) first, so that I can tune them in an environment where I can rapidly check
>that the effects are as desired (and yes, this may take a few trial and
>errors).
>
>Believe me, once you come to master regEx (which requires extensive use, in
>different contexts) them, you come to see them as a real blessing rather than a
>curse. After a rocky start, you just fall deeply in love with them.
>
>Marielle
>_______________________________________________
>use-revolution mailing list
>use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
>Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
>http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>
>
>  
>