From: dblack@...
Date: 2007-08-07T17:52:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Alternate Regular Expressions?

Hi --

On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Ari Brown wrote:

> I'm moderately serious. This is going to be one of those projects that won't 
> see the light of day for maybe 6 months to a year.
> This looks largely what I was hoping to make, although in Ruby I had 
> invisioned this:
>
> matching email addresses (sample):
> a = LeetExp.new(:letters => [[a-z], :insensitive],
> 				:string => "@",
> 				:letters => [[a-z], :insensitive],
> 				:string => ".",
> 				:string => ["com", "net", "org", "edu"]
> )
>
> case line
> when a
> 	# ...
>
> My idea is to make it logical and human readable. Ruby is a language for 
> humans and UberBeings, and I think this should reflect Ruby's ideas.

Regular expressions are nothing if not logical :-)  And readability,
as always, is largely in the eye of the beholder.  I think the quest
for an alternative notation is fine, but there's nothing inherently
un-Ruby-like about what's there already.  Then again, I'm in a small
minority who find /x with a lot of extra whitespace a serious
impediment to understanding a pattern :-)

Anyway -- somewhere out there, though I haven't been able to find it,
is a library called Regexp::English by Florian Gross, which provides a
kind of English-language wrapper for regexes.  I don't know whether
it's still in development and/or at a point of usability.


David

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