[LA.pm] [Oc-pm] [San-Diego-pm] San Diego Perl Mongers Present Damian Conway

[Bob Mathews]

On Jun 25, 2014, at 1:14 PM, Christopher Grau <chris.grau at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So most sensible programmers either don't use them at all (and are thereby forced to reinvent worse wheels...badly), or else they fall back on an "evolutionary programming" approach: find an existing regex that looks like it might do, then randomly permute its "genome" over and over again until it appears to work.

Damian's a smart guy, but some of his advice is wacky. Neither of those things are "sensible" in my book. I've never had any trouble building arbitrarily complicated regexes. Has he got anything better than "build regexes with string interpolation"? That works, but if you find yourself going that direction, you should probably be using a real parser instead.

 -bob