Re: [SPAM] [boost] Re: Shortcut regex notation

From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-10-27 04:59:46

> Sarcasm aside, I am glad to see someone else came up with the same idea. I 
> would not consider it to be 'cute', a 'tour of force' possibly, yes.

Actually this idea comes up fairly often, I think both myself and Eric have 
been fairly resistant to the idea in our respective libraries.

There is certainly no technical issue in implementing such a series of 
operators.

Personally though I find these a little too cryptic for my taste; I prefer 
to see things spelt out in full so that a programmer coming new to the code 
can have half a chance of understanding it, rather than seeing some weird 
kind of operator abuse.

I would also like to encourage folks to compile their expressions once, and 
then reuse them many times (perhaps from multiple threads) rather than use 
an overloaded operator that interprets the string anew each time it's 
encountered.  There is also the problem that C++ operators don't map 1:1 to 
Perl operators, so we have to "abuse" the syntax somewhat.

Having said that, since it's clear that this is a personal preference issue, 
if you can come up with a coherent set of operators and their semantics, 
then lets look at this again, and maybe at least experiment with the idea.

John.