Re: Structural regular expressions

[Tom]

Miles Bader <miles <at> gnu.org> writes:

> 
> "Drew Adams" <drew.adams <at> Oracle.Com> writes:
> > That's the real point, I believe: the paper touts the use of regexps
> > to divide text into chunks that match - chunks that are not
> > necessarily lines, in order to then act on those chunks in some way.
> 
> Not a good base, I think -- regexps are not really powerful enough to do
> the job well.
> 

Well, it doesn't have to be implemented with regexps, but the concept itself
seems useful that you can address syntactical blocks intelligently in the
buffer.

So it's a selection mechanism which can utilize both standard,
line oriented regexps and syntax-aware, multi line oriented patterns 
in a recursive fashion to efficiently select parts of the buffer to
perform an operation on.