Re: [boost] Re: Announcing: xpressive

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-11-18 10:24:56

David Abrahams wrote:
> "Joel de Guzman" <joel_at_[hidden]> writes:
> 
>> Same here. I dislike REs a lot. It gives me a mild headache whenever
>> I have to read understand one. "(hello )+world" is ok--It's the more
>> complex stuff that gives me an eye strain. For instance, from the
>>  regex manual: "\\A(\\d{3,4})[- ]?(\\d{4})[- ]?(\\d{4})[-
>> ]?(\\d{4})\\z". I really hate those escapes. I also hate the fact
>> that you can't format the code and sprinkle it with whitespace. The
>> ugliness of the RE syntax is one of the motivating forces that made
>> me write Spirit. 
> 
> Python's re module has a VERBOSE flag that lets you embed arbitrary
> whitespace and comments in regular expressions.  FWIW.

IMHO, everyone that missed

    http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/06/04/apo5.html

should go read it now.