Re: Unquoted special characters in regexps

[martin rudalics]

> But there definitely are many cases where you would have to parse back
> all the way to the beginning.

I don't want to parse regexps, neither forward nor backward.  I want to
understand what the author of the expression intended to match.  For
that purpose I try to extract familiar patterns from the expression.
Parsing a regexp in order to show that it's wrong or doesn't match what
it should doesn't make sense for most human beings.  The regexp engine
can do that much better.

Experienced programmers like you mentally parse complicated regexps from
beginning to end.  Experienced programmers occasionally forget that less
experienced programmers are not able to do that.