earthquake changes of std.regexp to come

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:13 PM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Ok.  I'm certainly not in love with the API either.  Though, the only
>>> RegEx API I've ever used that felt totally comfortable with was
>>> Perl's, which in large part is syntax instead of an API.  Python's
>>> syntax I have to look over the documentation every time I use it, too.
>>>  Maybe it's because of the "matching" vs "searching" distinction that
>>> I find impossible to remember.
>>> (http://docs.python.org/library/re.html)
>>>
>>
>> Is there ever a situation where you want to use a single regexp for
>> both matching _and_ searching?  And if not, couldn't you just use ^ to
>> anchor it?  I never understood why Python's API makes such a
>> distinction.
>
> Ehm, that's odd. You'd think that after Perl has set the precedent, it would
> be hard to do major goofs in designing a regex API.
>
> By the way, the more I dig into std.regexp, the stiffer the hair on my neck
> gets. Get this: the API offers both global functions and member functions,
> with both RegExp and plain string arguments. The latter are carefully
> designed to maximize the number of clashes, potential confusions, and errors
> when using both std.string and std.regex.

All I know is that I found one incantation that works and I've been
copy-pasting that every since. :-)

> But wait, there's more. The API defines the following functions that all
> ostensibly do some sort of mattern patching (sic): find, search, test,
> match, and exec. I wish I were kidding. There's some opIndex and opEquals
> thrown in for good measure. Knuth wouldn't know what each of them does after
> studying them for a week and then watching an episode from "The Bachelor".
> And get this: global search() does not do what member search() does. Nope.
> Global search() does what member test() does. I have only contempt for such
> designs.

Maybe "design" is too strong a word.  Most Phobos modules seem to have
been put together rather hastily in order to fill a pressing need.
Often *something* is better than nothing at all, even if the something
is not so great.

--bb