Re: [q-lang-users] regex

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Keith Trenton wrote:
> My only (quasi-rhetorical) question is this: what advantage, beyond being able to claim Q regex are POSIX-compliant, does POSIX-compliant give to Q?

Backward compatibility. This might not be important to anyone else right
now, but it does matter to me, as I already have a large number of Q
scripts to maintain, so I think twice before breaking backward
compatibility for no good reason.

I'm not arguing that Perl regexes have become the real standard, and
that they're much more useful than the POSIX ones. But what would be the
benefits of just throwing away the existing regex implementation in
clib? If I'm not mistaken, in Python you also have to write 'import re',
so why wouldn't you want to write something like 'import pcre' in Q?
Nobody forces you to use the POSIX regexes if you don't want them.

Of course someone still has to *write* that libpcre wrapper, that's the
real issue here. ;-)

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag