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Postings from May 2016
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.
-zefram
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