Re: yet another pattern-matching library for Lua

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

Paul Hudson a écrit :
> > with a gentler learning curve than regular expressions.
>
> I accept that people find regexps difficult, but it baffles me sometimes 
> why. I don't recall(*) having a problem learning them. What aspects of 
> them do people find difficult?
>
> (*) But since I first encountered them about 20 years ago, I may have 
> forgotten the problems I had.

I am active at a forum on AutoHotkey, a scripting language for Windows 
that recently integrated regular expressions (partly because I lobbied 
for them... :-P).
The mean target audience of this program isn't very programming savvy, 
some people start programming with it (coming from the necessity to 
automate Windows programs).
And I often see remarks that REs are intimidating/hard to learn.
I wrote a tutorial on them, hoping to help in the learning process.

I think that part of the difficulty to learn RE is their cryptic look. 
Lot of backslashes and strange chars, they aren't easy to read.
Some other concepts, like greediness, are often overlooked too.
When I wanted to use REs in SciTE to find a function, I was surprised to 
see it selected almost the whole file (before they were limited to line 
search).
Advanced uses, like lookarounds, are hard to master.

--
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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