Re: Ugly regexps

[Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

>> I was going to ask why not just do PCRE, but then I realized I'm not
>> exactly sure what the syntactical differences are.  (We obviously lack
>> some features.)  AFAIR, Emacs regexps don't exactly match GNU grep,
>> egrep, Perl, or anything else really.
>
> These things don't exactly match eachother, do they?

There is also a POSIX standard for BRE and ERE that we don't follow.

My point is that we could match one of the above, even if they don't
match each other.

> The "biting" effect is surely small.  I have little difficulty using
> grep, egrep and awk, all of whose regexp notations differ somewhat.

I am happy to hear that this works well for you.  Two decades after
writing my first regexp, I still tend to forget sometimes (oh wait is it
\+ in sed again?).  Then I have to look these stupid details up for the
Nth time.

> There's not a lot wrong with Emacs's regexp notation.  It works, works
> well, and we're all familiar with it.

Of course it gets the job done in the sense that you can write a regexp
that will match what you want.

But it is overly verbose in common cases, making regexps harder than
they need to be to read, understand and modify.