On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 14:26, Eirik Berg Hanssen
<eirik-berg.hans...@allverden.no> wrote:
> "jerry gay" <jerry....@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 13:16, Eirik Berg Hanssen
>> <eirik-berg.hans...@allverden.no> wrote:
>>> That doesn't look very "eager" to me.
>>>
>> it's "eager" for the match to close, which is the opposite of "greedy"
>> matching. in perl 5 documentation, it's called "non-greedy". for use
>> and explanation of the terminology, see
>> http://perlcabal.org/syn/S05.html#Backtracking_control.
>> ~jerry
>
> If that's now the case, that's unfortunately confusing. In other
> contexts, "eagerness" is "leftmost" ("eager" for matching to start, if
> you like), which is orthogonal to "greed":
>
> # Perl Cookbook illustration of eagerness, expanded to demonstrate
> # that the non-greedy case is equivalent:
> $string = 'good food';
> if ($greedy) {
> $string =~ s/o*/e/; # 'egood food'
> }
> else {
> $string =~ s/o*?/e/; # 'egood food'
> }
>
> Why not stick to "non-greedy", if that's what you mean? Surely
> that's not ambiguous?
>
>
i agree the wording isn't clear here, but it is consistent with the
current design language. i don't want to define something with a
negative, so i purposefully did not use "non-greedy". i'll bring it up
at the next design meeting, so the linguists can weigh in.
~jerry
