On 05/11/2010 04:12 PM, Warp wrote:

>    I have always found it curious that you are infatuated with a
> programming language known for the brevity of its programs, yet have
> an almost irrational prejudice against regular expressions.
>
>    This is doubly curious because both Haskell and regular expressions
> are based quite heavily on mathematical backgrounds, so it's yet another
> thing in common with them.

It's not the concept of a regular expression as such. It's the fact that 
all known implementations work by mixing up code and data in the same 
encrypted string.

OK, so it's convenient to be able to say "foo*bar" and mean "any string 
that starts with 'foo' and ends with 'bar'". But by the time you've 
added 25 different special characters with a dense set of possible means 
such that you have an almost Turing-complete language, my reaction is 
"for God's sake, stop trying to encode the entire language grammar into 
a text string and go use a /real/ programming language!"

FWIW, I dislike printf format strings for essentially the same reason...

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