DMD 0.148 - regular expressions

[James Dunne]

Trevor Parscal wrote:
> In article <dtsjs6$1lp0$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Dave says...
> 
>>In article <dts47r$14c0$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Lars Ivar Igesund says...
>>
>>>Walter Bright wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>The match expressions are gone. Based on the feedback, people didn't want
>>>>D to adopt perl'ish notation or implicitly defined variables. Instead,
>>>>foreach statements now allow implicit typing of the key/value
>>>>declarations, and the if statement now can declare a variable for the
>>>>result (an adaptation of Ben Hinkle's idea).
>>>
>>>I liked the idea (match expressions), just not the operator, and I thought
>>>that was a common opinion...
>>
>>So did I (but the operators didn't bother me). I was surprised to see the
>>'built-in' behaviour removed. From my understanding, it wasn't terribly
>>complicated to implement and there wasn't any overhead unless it was used. There
>>really wasn't any 'perl'ish notation' to speak of, and the recent addition of if
>>statement result variables would have taken care of the implicitly defined
>>variable issue.
>>
>>I think it was a mistake to remove the built-in's. Now I bet they're gone for
>>good. Arrrgh. I think D would better appeal to a large segment of developers
>>(using scripting languages like Perl) with the built-in regex match
>>functionality. 
>>
>>IIRC, most of the posts liked the built-in idea but took issue with a few of the
>>details. We've gone from talk about how the compiler can optimize matching
>>behaviour to removing the built-in's entirely. I don't get it..
>>
>>- Dave
>>
>>
> 
> 
> I think the addition and than removal was pretty odd.. I was just about to
> rewrite some code using the match operator - but I am glad I diddn't.
> 
> But you know - as much as we all demand features and get mad when they aren't
> included, it was nice to see a feature get included. But now it gets taken away
> so quickly, I don't know what will be taken out next.. :)
> 
> Please don't remove dynamic arrays walter!
> 
> Just kidding - we all love you!
> 
> Thanks,
> Trevor Parscal

Why is this move (taking out the built-in behavior) so seemingly 
unexpected to everyone?  Walter outright said "Don't write production 
code with this feature."

-- 
Regards,
James Dunne