earthquake changes of std.regexp to come

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Tue Feb 17 10:36:06 PST 2009


I'm quite unhappy with the API of std.regexp. It's a chaotic design that 
provides a hodgepodge of functionality and tries to use as many synonyms 
of "to find" in the dictionary (e.g. search, match). I could swear 
Walter never really cared for using regexps, and that is felt throughout 
the design: it fills the bullet point but it's asinine to use.

Besides std.regexp only works with (narrow) strings and we want it to 
work on streams of all widths and structures. One pet complaint I have 
is that std.regexp puts a class around it all as if everybody's favorite 
pastime would be to inherit Regexp and override some random function in it.

In the upcoming releases of D 2.0 there will be rather dramatic breaking 
changes of phobos. I just wanted to ask whether y'all could stomach yet 
another rewritten API or you'd rather use std.regexp as it is for the 
time being.


Andrei



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