Tom Wyant via RT wrote: >Karl's addition of "... and not after an assertion" makes sense to >me on the face of it, since it makes no sense (to me) to quantify an >assertion. If ^ matches once at a given location, it will match any >number of times. That would make some sense if such a rule were being added, but it's not. /\A/ is such an assertion, and everything you say about /^/ applies equally to /\A/. Yet /\A{/ has been deprecated at the same time as /x{/. There is no exception to the deprecation for assertions. If assertions were a consistent exception, I'd still be opposed to that. They're not an exception to quantifier syntax: /\A{3}/ is a quantified assertion, as is /^{3}/. We also don't have that kind of contextual exception for other metacharacters. /*/ is an error, even though by your logic the "*" can't possibly be intended as a quantifier because it's at the beginning of the pattern. /[/ is an error, even though without a "]" it can't possibly be interpreted as a character class. >"Always removed" is certainly trivial, but "removed except at the >beginning of a group and after an assertion" is not much harder. The reality is harder than either. Implementing whatever it is isn't going to be difficult, but finding out what it is *is*. We should make the reality as simple as possible, to make it as easy as possible for programmers to know it accurately. -zeframThread Previous | Thread Next