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Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17)
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17) |
Date: |
Tue, 2 Apr 2019 15:08:43 -0700 |
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Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.6.1 |
On 4/2/19 7:15 AM, Mattias Engdegård wrote:
> where does a user go to understand extant regexps?
A user that *really* wants to know can go read the source code and get
confused, just like I did. :-)
But I think it's better if the documentation doesn't say what happens.
If you prefer that the documentation explicitly say that it doesn't say
what happens, I guess that would be OK too (what sort of wording would
you like, though?).
> (Do we have any latitude at all for changing even obscure corners of
> regexp syntax and semantics today?)
I would say so, certainly for the raw 8-bit-bytes in ranges stuff (where
nobody knows what they mean or even should mean), and possibly even for
some of the other rarely-used and questionable uses.
>
> I've attached the ones found by a modified relint/xr, in case you are
> interested.
Sure! Fixed in the attached patch.
>
> +A character alternative can include duplicates. For example,
> address@hidden is less clear than @samp{[XYa-z]}.
>
> Certainly, but does this need to be mentioned? Overlapping ranges are rarely
> written on purpose. Besides, duplication isn't confined to ranges.
That example does contains non-range duplicates. I think duplicates are
worth mentioning (if only so that your trawler can point to the style
advice if people complain about the trawler being too picky :-).
> More useful, I think, would be to recommend ranges to stay within natural
> sequences (letters, digits, etc) so that a reader needn't consult a table to
> see what is included. Thus [0-9.:/] good, [.-:] bad, even though they denote
> the same set.
Good idea. I did that in the attached patch, which I just installed into
master and I hope addresses the points you raised. I hope that the Thai
example doesn't mess things up (I considered doing Arabic, which would
have been more fun :-).
0001-Improve-regexp-advice-again-and-unchain-ranges.txt
Description: Text document
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17), Paul Eggert, 2019/04/02
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17), Mattias Engdegård, 2019/04/02
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17), Noam Postavsky, 2019/04/02
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17), Stefan Monnier, 2019/04/02
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17),
Paul Eggert <=
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17), Mattias Engdegård, 2019/04/06
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17), Michael Albinus, 2019/04/07
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17), Paul Eggert, 2019/04/07
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17), Mattias Engdegård, 2019/04/07
- Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17), Paul Eggert, 2019/04/07