Re: Ugly regexps

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 04.03.2021 07:47, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
>> Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2021 21:58:17 +0200
>> Content-Language: en-US
>> Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>
>> On 03.03.2021 21:21, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> And ERE isn't?
>>
>> To be fair, extended regular expressions are the regular expressions
>> flavor most commonly used in the contemporary world, recent/popular
>> programming languages, etc.
>>
>> So for a lot of people this won't be +1 thing to learn.
> 
> So we are now going to cater to users of other programs more than we
> cater to Emacs users who are used to the Emacs RE syntaxes?  How does
> that make sense?  Do other programs prefer the Emacs RE syntax to
> their own?

Not "more". Just make an extra (fairly small) effort to accommodate them.

> We have rx for many years, and just recently enhanced it
> significantly.  I fail to see how it would make sense to introduce yet
> another RE syntax into Emacs, with all the overhead that brings with
> it.  Maybe it could make sense as an ELPA add-on, but not in core.

The 'ere' function would be helpful to have in the core either way. As 
already mentioned in this thread, I have been using an equivalent of it 
for 5 years now.

> More generally, I wish we stopped investing so much of our time and
> energy in cleanups and other support tasks, and more to add
> significant new applications and editing features.  That would make
> more users happier, I think.

Perhaps if contributors didn't have to fight you about every little 
thing they need to change or fix (or if you responded to arguments, at 
least), we'll get more features over time. This is especially 
discouraging when the disagreement is over a minor change in a package I 
supposedly maintain (bug#44611 is the most glaring example).

I can't threaten to slam the door and leave every time this happens, but 
this kind of malarkey sucks out a significant amount of time and enthusiasm.