Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages

On Wed, 20 Nov 2024 05:46:49 -0600
Ed Morton <mortonspam@gmail.com> boring babbled:

On 11/20/2024 2:21 AM, Muttley@DastartdlyHQ.org wrote:

On Tue, 19 Nov 2024 18:43:48 -0800
merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) boring babbled:

"Lawrence" == Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

>
Lawrence> Perl was the language that made regular expressions
Lawrence> sexy. Because it made them easy to use.
>
I'm often reminded of this as I've been coding very little in Perl these
days, and a lot more in languages like Dart, where the regex feels like
a clumsy bolt-on rather than a proper first-class citizen.

 
Regex itself is clumsy beyond simple search and replace patterns. A lot of
stuff I've seen done in regex would have better done procedurally at the
expense of slightly more code but a LOT more readability.

>
Definitely. The most relevant statement about regexps is this:
>

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use
regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

Very true!

Obviously regexps are very useful and commonplace but if you find you
have to use some online site or other tools to help you write/understand
one or just generally need more than a couple of minutes to
write/understand it then it's time to back off and figure out a better
way to write your code for the sake of whoever has to read it 6 months
later (and usually for robustness too as it's hard to be sure all rainy
day cases are handled correctly in a lengthy and/or complicated regexp).

Edge cases are regex achilles heal, eg an expression that only accounted
for 1 -> N chars, not 0 -> N, or matches in the middle but not at the ends.