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Postings from January 2012
I was cleared to deprecate the sequence backslash,
ASCII-alpha-character, left brace in 5.14 in regular expression
patterns, but in looking through the list of candidates someone
furnished, I saw only two that I thought we would ever might want to
co-opt, and so \b{ and \B{ are now deprecated; I have heard of no user
complaints.
But I and others think that there are uses for other sequences, such as
\w{, and I wondered why I hadn't thought so before. It turns out that
the list which I blindly accepted didn't contain that as a possibility.
So now, I would like to get clearance to deprecate this sequence, for
any ASCII alpha character for which it is not already defined.
In an earlier thread, someone pointed out that \w{3,4}, for example has
current meaning. Of course we can't change that. It would be handled
the same way we currently handle sequences like
\x{41}{3,4}
which means to match 3 or 4 'A's in a row, or
\N{COLON}{0,}
meaning to match any number of ':' characters in a row. We could at
some point v5.20 or later define
\w{foo}{1,}
to mean at least one of whatever \w{foo} is chosen to mean.
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