Re: New VSI post on Youtube

On 8/24/2024 8:37 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Sat, 24 Aug 2024 20:21:12 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

On 8/24/2024 6:38 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Sat, 24 Aug 2024 14:50:51 -0700, Lars Poulsen wrote:

This is one of the many reasons I like PERL.

>
Perl completely changed the game with its combination of good regular
expressions, good string handling, and good data structures as well. I
credit Perl with popularizing the whole concept of regular expressions:
before that, they were considered something esoteric.
>
For example, BASIC was considered to have good string-handling
facilities. But it never had good regular expressions or hash tables;
and the coming of Perl made BASIC look quite old-fashioned indeed.

>
80's and early 90's Basic flavors (and that include VMS Basic)
did not have those.
>
But later MS Basic flavors did have them:
* VB/VBS/VBA has RegExp class and Scripting.Dictionary
    COM class
* VB.NET has System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex and
    System.Collections.Hashtable (later replaced by
    System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary)

 Did you really have to type those longwinded names that just to access
them?
 In Python, it’s just “import re”.

VB.NET like most modern languages use hierarchical
packages/namespaces. That tend to make the names longer.
But else it is pretty similar.
Somewhere at the top:
Import System.Collections.Generic
Import System.Text.RegularExpressions
and then:
Dim d As New Dictionary(Of X,Y)()
Dim r As New Regex(someregexexpr)
Arne