Re: New section to easily reference Debbugs URLs within Emacs Debbugs

[Brian Cully]

Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de> writes:

> By the way, I still believe it's less off-putting for average people
> to see two lines of regular expressions instead of 28 lines of
> symbolic expressions.

The original patch did use standard regexp notation, and I adjusted it
to the ‘rx’ version. While, in general, I prefer terse code over the
verbose, I felt this was a good change because the first principle in
software freedom is the ability for others to understand and modify
code. Regexp notation is famously complex and hard to read and
understand. I, myself, have been using it extensively for decades, and I
still had to carefully study the previous regexp in order to translate
it.

So, in my opinion, while the ‘rx’ macro is substantially longer, it
provides a much greater ability to be understood and modified, and that
is more important than copying fewer characters.

-bjc