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Postings from October 2015
On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 11:33:55AM +0200, demerphq wrote:
> On 19 October 2015 at 04:50, Ricardo Signes <perl.p5p@rjbs.manxome.org> wrote:
> > * Karl Williamson <public@khwilliamson.com> [2015-10-18T00:16:44]
> >> Just to make sure everyone understands.
> >>
> >> Currently (?#...) comments are allowed even when there is no /x. We
> >> probably have to support that in the places where it's been that way all
> >> along, but we could decide to not support them in the places that I just
> >> added, when not under /x. Thus, we could say that you can't split a
> >> quantifier from its atom except under /x.
> >
> > Thanks, I was confused.
> >
> >> I don't have an opinion on this.
> >
> > I'm not strongly opinionated on this, but: I think that I would find it useful
> > to say:
> >
> > If you want to put comments into a regular expression, you have two
> > options. You use /x and then insert space and any kind of comments between
> > tokens, or you can skip /x and use (?#...) between tokens.
> >
> > That is: always allow (?#...) in those places where space and comments become
> > allowed under /x.
>
>
> I really dont like this. A) it complicates the regex engine, and B) it
> makes a mockery of what an expert would consider to be one token.
>
> so for instance to *me*: a{1,10} is a single token.
To me, it isn't.
To Perl, it isn't either, as
/a {1,10}/x
matches up to 10 a's:
$ perl -wE '"aaaaaaaaaa" =~ /a {1,10}/x; say $& // "UNDEF"'
aaaaaaaaaa
$
And it's not that /x just removes any whitespace it finds, as it
doesn't remove the whitespace inside the braces:
$ perl -wE '"aaaaaaaaaa" =~ /a { 1,10}/x; say $& // "UNDEF"'
UNDEF
$
(In this case, it tries to match the literal string "a{1,10}" -- one
can wonder whether that's the most useful thing it could do).
Compiling /a {1,10}/x shows the tokes perl think there are:
1: CURLY {1,10} (5)
3: EXACT <a> (0)
5: END (0)
>
> a(?#whatever){1,10}
>
> is two "tokens".
>
I don't see any benefit of suddenly disallowing a space (under /x)
between 'a' and '{1,10}', nor to allow space there, but not a
comment. I don't see myself easily use an inline comment there,
but I also don't think Perl should enforce a particular coding
style upon its users. That just makes the language less flexible,
and prohibits creativity.
Abigail
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