Thoughts regular expressions in, for example sed

[Hormatzhan Yiltiz]

That is, of course, is not something that we want. AT MOST, it can be
just deemed as a feature for *sed*, or even installing the core system is
out of the question.
In this case, I strongly agree with Paul.

祝好，
Hormetjan Yiltiz    玉尔麦提江·伊里提孜
Department of Psychology, Peking University
010-86751406
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else* from you (and me).
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Gibran


On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 4:20 PM, Johnny Rosenberg <gurus.knugum at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2013/1/12 Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net>:
> > On Sat, 2013-01-12 at 15:05 +0100, Johnny Rosenberg wrote:
> >> Maybe it's time for ”the next version” (total remake) of the whole
> >> concept of regular expressions and give it a few decades.
> >> The old ”version” could then be referred to as ”regular exceptions”…
> >
> > There already is a de-facto standard advanced regular expression library
> > available today: PCRE which is the extraction of Perl's regular
> > expression implementation into a separate library.  These days pretty
> > much every new program that wants to support regular expressions uses
> > that.  It's far and away the most powerful and sophisticated RE
> > implementation we have.
> >
> > But, there are so many hundreds of thousands of scripts out there that
> > rely on tools like awk, sed, grep, etc. to work the way they do that
> > there's literally zero chance that their default syntax will be changed
> > in non-compatible ways.  I'm not sure you grasp how devastating these
> > kinds of changes would be and how the widespread the impact would be.
> > There are sed and awk scripts that were written 20 years ago and haven't
> > been looked at since, still embedded in critical systems all over the
> > world.
> >
> > Not to mention that GNU/Linux is not the only UNIX/POSIX system out
> > there and so adherence to the POSIX standards is critically important
> > for people who need to produce portable software--and many of those
> > people are exactly the same ones who would be making these changes.
> >
> > So, no, not gonna happen.
>
> That's because everyone says that it's not going to happen…
> People said that about lots of things 30 years ago, and many of those
> things doesn't even exist today…
> I think it could happen, but maybe not within 30 years, but why hurry?
>
> > The best you could get would be for everyone
> > to agree to _add_ PCRE (for example) to the RE-using tools, and have
> > some extra switch or environment variable that could be set to enable
> > them for those that wanted it.
> >
> >
> > I'll repeat something I said the other day: you should be learning a
> > more sophisticated scripting language like Perl.  Perl has all the
> > capabilities of shell, sed, awk, and just about any other UNIX tool
> > built in, plus capabilities none of the others can match.  And it has a
> > regular and consistent syntax, ability to handle unusual filenames
> > without glitching, etc.  And it is installed, and runs, everywhere.
> >
> > I've been working on UNIX systems for... a really, really long time
> > (since before Linus sat down to write his first kernel).  My personal
> > rule is that if a shell script I'm writing ever gets longer than about
> > 25 lines or so, OR if it ever seems necessary to use awk, I chuck it and
> > write it in Perl instead.  Sed is fine, but if I need awk I might as
> > well switch to Perl.
> >
> >
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