compile-time regex redux

[Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)]

janderson wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> String mixins, in order to be useful, need an ability to manipulate 
>> strings at compile time. Currently, the core operations on strings 
>> that can be done are:
>>
>> At some point, this will prove a barrier to large scale use of this 
>> feature.
> 
> While I'm a fan of regex I'm not sure it meets the goal of scale.  I can 
> imagine that regex expressions + templates will get unreadable (or at 
> least very slow to read) as programs get larger.

Symbols and modularity will definitely go a long way to help this. A 
one-shot long regexp is pretty intimidating, but one containing 
appropriate symbols all of a sudden starts looking like... a clean 
sequence of tokens.

Andrei