std.regexp vs std.regex [Re: RegExp.find() now crippled]

[Jesse Phillips]

Steve Teale Wrote:

> I guess std.regexp is still there because not all of us necessarily want to iterate a range to simply find out the position of the first whitespace in a string.

I'm pretty sure it is still there for the same reason many are, trying to figure out when it should be removed.

> Part of the expressiveness of languages is that one should be free to use the style that suits, and not have to read the documentation every time one uses it. Give me options in Phobos by all means.

That has nothing to do with expressiveness, familiarity/easy of use sure. 

> D2 is not going to succeed by forcing its users to use unfamiliar, and maybe not yet very fashionable constructions.

Not providing, does not mean forcing to use.

> I'm pissed off because this change broke a lot of my code, which I had not used for some time, but now have a paying customer for. The code did not break because of D language evolution. It broke because somebody decided they did not like the style of std.regexp.  All I wanted was plain old regular expressions, similar to JavaScript, or PHP, or other popular languages, and std.regexp did that pretty well at one time.

I agree, there is no reason a module that is scheduled for deletion should have changes made that would cause existing code to break. But looking at the history, there doesn't seem to be such changes for at least the last year. The only questionable change (one that wasn't just type changes to auto/spacing) happened 3 months ago, but I don't think the behavior was intended to change:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/phobos/changeset/1923/trunk/phobos/std/regexp.d