Re: modern regexes in emacs

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

On Fri, 15 Feb 2019 17:24:18 +0100 Mattias Engdegård
<mattiase@acm.org> wrote:
> 15 feb. 2019 kl. 15.18 skrev Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
> > 
> > It should be possible if we introduce new functions for PCRE, or
> > if we mark PCRE regexps in some special way, like put a special
> > text property on the string.  
> 
> It would be easier if those who ask for PCRE would say exactly what
> they want:
> 
> (1) The syntax of PCRE -- | () {} instead of \| \(\) \{\} etc --
> but restricted to the set of features of the Emacs regexp engine.

Modern syntax is the main one.

> (2) The features of PCRE not present in Emacs regexps. Which ones,
> exactly? Lookbehind assertions? Atomic groups?

I'm not particularly interested in those.

> (3) PCRE for interactive use only.
> (4) PCRE for general Elisp programming. 

The old style syntax is repulsive. I think we should make it possible
to slowly switch over to the syntax everyone using regexps has gotten
used to over the last 30 years or so. BREs in the style Emacs has
been using have been obsolete for longer than many Emacs users have
been alive.

> Locating and wrapping the places that ask for regexps
> interactively, such as `query-replace-regexp', would permit the
> interactive regexp syntax to become a simple user customisation --
> traditional, PCRE, rx or whatnot. It would be a matter of writing a
> transformation function, and possibly some syntax highlighting, for
> each case.
> 
> I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of the requests are really about not
> having to escape |(){} as metacharacters in interactive use.

No, that's a lot of my complaint. I can't even remember what the
correct syntax is half the time.

Anyway, I recommend Eli's approach. We create a parallel set of
modernized syntax functions, and people can slowly adopt them.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com