Re: [boost] Syntactic sugar for regex

From: Douglas Gregor (gregod_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-07-27 11:10:01

On Thursday 26 July 2001 11:18, you wrote:
> At 07:08 AM 7/26/2001, John Maddock wrote:
[snip perlish syntax discussion]
>
> Interesting!
>
> But I'm having trouble seeing the big picture.  How does this relate to
> Darin Adler's http://groups.yahoo.com/group/boost/files/string_algorithm/
> stuff?
>
> --Beman

It is merely an alternative interface to the regex algorithms (though it 
could probably be retargetted to the string algorithms library). 

It's just syntactic sugar and I'm not quite sure about the overall Boost 
regard for the use of operator overloading in non-arithmetic ways. The use of 
+ for string concatenation in the standard library is often cited by 
opponents of operator overloading because it deviates from the meaning of +, 
and the same could be said for the use of << and >> as streaming operators. 

That said, if the Boost consensus is that operator overloading is indeed not 
harmful, even when the overloads have very different meanings (the Spirit 
parser comes to mind), then I believe that perlish should be included as an 
optional layer on top of either regex or the string algorithms library. 
Similar syntax has worked very well for Perl and sed for quite a while, why 
not give C++ programmers the same option?

        Doug