Re: Raw strings (experimental patches inside)

[Vr Rm]

On 08/09/2012 10:08 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Vr Rm writes:
>
>   > But the difficulty in using Emacs regular expressions shouldn't be
>   > underestimated, especially for those of us on the dim side of the
>   > superhuman spectrum.
>
> Nothing personal, but if you can't even search for tabs (C-s C-q TAB
> will do), of course you're going to find regexps difficult.  It's hard
> to see how they can be simplified -- as used in all languages I know,
> regexps are extremely compact notation.  Such notation is going to be
> non-trivial if you can't remember to use C-q to insert command
> characters literally, and I don't think raw strings are going to help.
> (A sane assignment of character classes such that punctuation is
> always an operator, as in Perl or Python, would be much more mnemonic
> help, I think.)

I do totally agree that I'm appealing from the lower 50%, maybe even the 
top 90%, of the population of programming proficiency.  For myself, I 
wish it weren't true but alas it is.  (But as a profession does, as a 
middle aged man -- for which there's nothing else I'm qualified to do, 
nor would anyone have the slightest interest hiring me to learn -- keep 
me from going homeless and hungry and from becoming a burden to society.)

However, I have been using Emacs for 20 years, since 1992 when it was 
installed in our university's brand new Sparc stations, on a somewhat 
continual basis. (And for the last 5 years intensely for more or less 
all my programming tasks.)  In addition, I use regular expressions, if 
not ever day, quite often in a variety of languages, Javascript, Groovy, 
Python and Clojure being my favourite implementations.  And, while they 
all have their own idiosyncrasy I can move between them pretty easily. 
Yet every time I try to use Emacs regular expressions, either on the 
command line or in elisp, for anything more complex than "ca+dr", I'm 
thwarted.

As for the TAB, yes I completely agree, Emacs has a fully complete 
regular expression system.  Yet, I always fail at using it.  I thought 
I'd try it again just to see if perhaps things have improved or maybe I 
was miss remembering but if I want to search for:

/.*\)$/

i.e. a parenthesis at the end of a line.  I can't do it!  Same is true 
for a search find all tabs not at the beginning of the line and not 
preceded by a tab:

/^[^\t]+\t/

It's entirely possible that the above are actually close.  Or that the 
Emacs versions are even more efficient and compact. But I can't figure 
them out without spending a bunch of time reading through info, and 
then, by the next time I return to them, I will have forgotten the Emacs 
specific quirks.  (Or can only remember the quirks of other languages, 
if you prefer.)

Again, I'm fully aware that with respect to Emacs proficiency (and 
probably programming proficiency in general) I'm far below most 
subscribers to this list and certainly the contributors.

And I'm not really arguing this feature for myself, but rather, on 
humanitarian grounds if you will :) ...  as a single data point of a 
population that would dramatically benefit if they could actually use 
Emacs regular expressions.