From: Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs@...>
Date: 2001-11-20T19:18:57+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:25903] Re: ANN: regex engine development (was: Re: Why not xmlparser?)

On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Bill Kelly wrote:

>
>    re = %r{
>              \(
>              (?:
>                 (?> [^()]+ )    # Non-parens without backtracking
>               |
>                 (??{ re })      # (Sub-)group with matching parens
>              )*
>              \)
>           }x
>

If you are rewriting this engine, one thing I would really like to see
is NAMES for these things.  \d, \D and such are somewhat intuitive, but
the ?: ?= and so forth are nearly impossible to remember.  I always have
to look them up.  (And people complain that Assembler was difficult to
read...)

>
> Regards,
>
> Bill
>
	Hugh.