From: Wesley J Landaker <wjl@...>
Date: 2003-06-01T04:17:26+09:00
Subject: Re: regexp operators

On Saturday 31 May 2003 10:35 am, nobu.nokada@softhome.net wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At Sun, 1 Jun 2003 00:10:15 +0900,
>
> Wesley J Landaker wrote:
> > Well, + meaning concatination makes sense to me. What else would it
> > mean? Notice that I do put regexps in (?:) groups so that you don't
> > have any ambiguity if you do something like:
> >
> > /foo|bar/ + /.*/   # => /(?:foo|bar)(?:.*)/u
>
> One possibility:
> => /(?:foo|bar).*(?:.*)/u

I tend to think of + for regexp to be like + for strings--just a simple 
concatenation. However, I can see how the above would make sense, if 
you think of "a + b" as meaning more like "match a, and then match b; 
what's in between doesn't really matter".

If you did that, you'd need some way to do the "a directly followed by 
b" semantics. I suppose << would work for that, though. =)

/foo|bar/ << /.*/
=> /(?:foo|bar)(?:.*)/

-- 
Wesley J. Landaker - wjl@icecavern.net
OpenPGP FP: C99E DF40 54F6 B625 FD48  B509 A3DE 8D79 541F F830