From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
To: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
Cc: van@scratch.space, emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org, npostavs@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2018 20:01:38 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <83603dasy5.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20180524163534.GA4035@ACM> (message from Alan Mackenzie on Thu, 24 May 2018 16:35:34 +0000)
> Date: Thu, 24 May 2018 16:35:34 +0000
> Cc: Noam Postavsky <npostavs@gmail.com>, van@scratch.space, eliz@gnu.org,
> emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
>
> rx.el uses a wordy syntax, somewhat analagously to Cobol 50 years ago.
> Its premiss is that it's the terse, dense, austere characters which make
> a regexp difficult to write and read. I would suggest that it's more
> the abstract concepts which cause beginners difficulties, rather than
> the syntax. This was true of Cobol 50 years ago, and I think it's
> always been the case with regexps.
I actually agree with the premise: reading an rx spec of a regexp is
much easier than reading the regexp itself.
> That said, rx.el is used ~72 times in 19 files.el in Emacs, so somebody
> likes it.
I certainly do (but I'm not responsible for those uses).
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-05-24 17:01 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-05-21 11:18 bug#31544: Emacs 26.1 rc-1 Texinfo View fails to italicize all 6 lines in paragraph Van L
2018-05-21 16:23 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-05-21 23:45 ` Van L
2018-05-22 2:13 ` Richard Stallman
2018-05-22 2:40 ` Van L
2018-05-22 4:32 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-05-22 6:58 ` Off Topic (was: bug#31544) Van L
2018-05-23 3:24 ` Richard Stallman
2018-05-23 3:44 ` Van L
2018-05-23 11:06 ` Noam Postavsky
2018-05-24 2:48 ` Richard Stallman
2018-05-24 9:03 ` Off Topic Robert Pluim
2018-05-24 15:20 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-05-24 15:41 ` Robert Pluim
2018-05-24 17:07 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-05-25 2:59 ` Richard Stallman
2018-05-24 16:35 ` Off Topic (was: bug#31544) Alan Mackenzie
2018-05-24 16:53 ` Yuri Khan
2018-05-24 19:57 ` Alan Mackenzie
2018-05-24 20:24 ` Noam Postavsky
2018-05-24 20:36 ` Off Topic Stefan Monnier
2018-05-25 3:01 ` Off Topic (was: bug#31544) Richard Stallman
2018-05-25 2:59 ` Richard Stallman
2018-05-24 17:01 ` Eli Zaretskii [this message]
2018-05-28 22:42 ` bug#31544: Emacs 26.1 rc-1 Texinfo View fails to italicize all 6 lines in paragraph Noam Postavsky
2022-01-23 13:57 ` bug#31544: texinfo-mode fails to consistently fontify multiline @i{italic text} Lars Ingebrigtsen
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