On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 7:34 PM, jerry gay <jerry....@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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":
Indeed, in the context of regular expressions this definition is
well-established, used in Friedl's book (widely considered definitive)
among other places.
> i agree the wording isn't clear here, but it is consistent with the
> current design language.
Consistent how? In that "eager" isn't used anywhere else yet, or is
this use of "eager" already established in the spec?
> i don't want to define something with a negative, so i purposefully did not
> use
> "non-greedy".
Well, you're not defining. You're contrasting with an established
definition. If you have what is essentially a Boolean-valued
attribute of behavior, surely it makes sense to use positive and
negative versions of a single adjective rather than two distinct ones
- especially two which aren't even antonyms in English.
If you must use a non-derived(*) form, why not choose something that
means "non-greedy" in English? Maybe "generous"?
(*) Note casual use of "non-" in actual dialogue :)
--
Mark J. Reed <markjr...@gmail.com>
