From: Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak@...>
Date: 2002-07-09T23:53:16+09:00
Subject: Re: String#split converts string args to regexes -- ?

Tue, 9 Jul 2002 23:06:58 +0900, Stepan Kasal <kasal@matsrv.math.cas.cz> pisze:

> 1) gsub()  ...  the parameter has to be regex, so I see no reason for
> accepting (and automatically converting) strings.

It's a pity that "convert a string to regexp" means "compile it".
I would expect it to mean "make a regexp recognizing that string".
Now I must explicitly quote it. If I wanted to have a regexp, I would
have used // instead of ""...

Quoting and unquoting is ugly and error-prone - look at tcl or sh.
I don't know tcl much but I saw results of poorly written scripts
caused by quoting.

> 2) split()   ...   one-character strings and regular expressing are
> absolutely necessery.  Automatic conversion of anything to regexp obfuscates
> split(), I think.  So I'd suggest either interpreting long strings as strings
> or forbidding them completely.

Me too; preferably interpreting them as strings. A pity that we can't
change gsub behavior.

I recently used s.gsub(/\{ident\}/) {ident} instead of more
straightforward s.gsub('{ident}') {ident}.

And a pity that I can't say s.gsub('{ident}', ident) because it will
work *almost always*, but break when ident contains backslashes.
Another quoting case that I don't like, although I understand the
reasons... I'm just using the block version unless the target is
a constant.

-- 
  __("<      Marcin Kowalczyk
  \__/     qrczak@knm.org.pl
   ^^    http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/