[oak perl] Most Annoying Regex?

George Woolley george at metaart.org
Tue Apr 6 14:22:26 CDT 2004


On Tuesday 06 April 2004 10:06 am, David Fetter wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 10:59:13PM -0700, George Woolley wrote:
> > On Monday 05 April 2004 3:09 pm, David Fetter wrote:
> > > On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 03:13:12PM -0700, George Woolley wrote:
> > > > What's the most annoying regex you've encountered?
> > >
> > > Anything that doesn't fit on one line.   After that, they're all
> > > equally annoying, and don't belong in production code. :)
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> > > D
> >
> > David,
> > Thanks for the provocative response.
> >
> > Based on your response, my understanding is that your position is
> > that there are no production environments in which which it is ever
> > appropriate to use regular expressions in production code.
> > Is that your view?
>
> I don't know how you managed to get that out of what I said.  In my
> experience, *complicated* regexes don't belong in production code.
> Multiple simple ones are a lot easier to code, debug, &c.
>
> Cheers,
> D

David,

Oh, good. 
I'm glad that your position isn't
that no regexes belong in production code.

You seem uncertain how I managed to understand you to be saying
that no regexes belong in production code.
Here's how:
* Because of the context I interpreted "they're all"
to be referring to "all regexes".
* I thought you were continuing with the same topic
in the second half of that sentence
(which has no explicit subject).
* That led me to interpret it as something like
"all regexes don't belong in production code"
or an unqualified "No regexes belong in production code".
Hope that clarifies how I managed to get that out of what you said.

I haven't so far come up with an alternate interpretation.
Hence I would be most interested in your interpretation
of your own words.

Anyway, I do now understand 
that you do not take the position 
that no regexes belong in production code.

George

P.S. Thanks for not deleting the earlier parts of the thread
in your post.
It makes discussion much easier.




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