From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2004-11-18T23:43:33+09:00
Subject: Re: About Regular Expressions


On Nov 18, 2004, at 9:26 AM, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

> I did not accuse any specific entity of misdoings, nor did I consider
> your posts; which are rather old by now.  I do not consider a post
> discussing the arity of regular expressions equivalent with one that
> asks if it is a bug that /[...a-b]/ doesn't match '-'.  The first one 
> is
> a rather esoteric question, which certainly proved that you weren't a
> newbie; the second is rather more newbyish as it shows unfamiliarity
> with one of the most basic regular expressions shorthands.  My 
> intention
> wasn't to dismiss the question as such, but wondering if it was a bug
> certainly shows that the person in question hadn't read up on regular
> expressions before trying to use them.

As the person who posted that question, let me just say that while 
there are lots of Ruby details I forget, you couldn't reasonably call 
me a newbie. One reason, I think, is that the char class I was dealing 
with had other characters that distracted me:

/^[0123456789.-*]+/

... which isn't certainly a sign of programming genius, but I like to 
think is the sort of odd blind spot that happens to most programmers 
from time to time. I'd also like to think that most of what I post here 
isn't nearly that newbie-ish, but then I'm obviously not the best judge 
of that.

F.