From: Dave Thomas <Dave@...>
Date: 2002-01-12T15:28:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Another suggestion for FreeRIDE

"Jack Dempsey" <dempsejn@georgetown.edu> writes:

> Could you please elaborate? I just caught the "" bug, but otherwise it seems
> to work correctly. I see how there could be problems in regex's, but did you
> see something else?

Unless you perform a pretty complete tokenization, you'll never really
know what's a $-variable and what's a comment, or a string, or a
regexp. Consider the following:

  a = [ $!, "$!", "#{$!}", "\#{$!}", %-$!-, %$!$ ]

Only two of the $!'s would need to be converted.

If FreeRide is going to include a parser, then it's definitely a good
idea to have refactorings included, including pre-canned things like
"rename Perl variables". But I don't think you'll be able to do it
with regexps.


Dave