Re: Feature request: plain option for gsub

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Friday, August 22, 2014, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2014-08-22 23:31 GMT+02:00 Sean Conner <sean@conman.org>:
> >> F#ck it, let's just tear out the spaghetti 500 lines of C for patterns and
> >> hoist in LPeg.  It's a better hammer anyway :-)))
> >
> >   I know Roberto has been thinking along those lines.
>
> And was daunted [1] by the length of the LPeg code in relation
> to all of the present standard library put together.
>
> [1] http://www.lua.org/wshop12/Ierusalimschy.pdf

Adding LPeg would fundamentally change Lua and the prevailing meaning to the body of people that us it, which would grow significantly. In two ways, LPeg would be to Lua as regex is to Perl[1].

Those that eventually become classified as "those who use LPeg, with that cool Lua language added In there, for complicated patterns" will demand first class ranges and patterns. Then comes the standard library and the call for more sugar. Then cats will play nice with dogs. It will be crazy....

-Andrew

[1]: I remember near the end of my C class in... 93-94, my teacher telling us about Perl. He demonstrated the use of regex by removing all of the formatted footers from a long text document with what looked like about 60 characters of line noise.