Hello All,
After reading over Apocalypse 5 one more time, I noticed that balanced
matches (like capturing nested parenthetical comments ((like this))) had
been glossed over in the rejection of RFC 145. What was not even
mentioned in the rejection was the possibility of balanced expressions
that would take rules as their opening and closing delimiters. This
would be especially useful, for example, when capturing nested tables in
an HTML document, since not all tables look the same (<table> vs. <tAbLE
attrs...> for instance). You may object that this would just make the
regexp uglier, but what happens if we allow XML-ish rules, e.g.
$html =~ /<balanced opening=<table_start> closing=<table_end>>/;
where the "balanced" rule gets to play with %_{opening} and %_{closing}
to do its magic?
I am not saying that such a "balanced" rule would be easy to implement
in Perl (I personally think that the "balanced" rule is something that
should be more deeply tied to the Regex Engine), but I am proposing that
it can simultaneously be very useful and still look nice. Isn't that
justification enough?
Comments are appreciated,
Peter Behroozi
