From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2007-02-08T08:15:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Patterns of semantic contradictions?

On Thu, 8 Feb 2007, Robert Dober wrote:

> Hi list
>
> I just could not resist to post a stupid remark - which was taken very
> gracefully ty ;) - to a thread where somebody corrected his typo with the
> well known sub idiom, only that he did something like
>
> "abcdefghijklmnop".gsub(/a/,"A")
>
> I am kind of troubled with this, of course this is equivalent to using #sub,
> and the question that arose in my head is the following.
> Is this a pattern to avoid? Can there be good reasons to do this and
> furthermore and most importantly are there some publications about
> "Antipatterns" like that. Maybe on much grater scale than my fun example.
>
> Well it is time to explain why it is an Antipattern to me, maybe you do not
> agree at all.
>
> being a code reviewer and seeing 5 lines later
> "abcda".gsub(/a/,"A")
> I will be troubled, or should I not? Is it sound to assume that the coder
> knows what she is doing?

hmmm.  hard to say without context, but i generally squirm at any regex that
has neither anchors nor uses the positive, rather than negative - eg i prefer

   pathname =~ %r| IMG [^/]+ \.jpg $ |iox

to

   pathname =~ %r/ IMG.*jpg /iox


because it's can't sweep down path separators.

interesing thread...

-a
-- 
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better.
simply reflect on that.
- the dalai lama