On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Rick Johnson <rantingrickjohn...@gmail.com> wrote: > I disagree here. > Whist some people may be "die-hard" fans of the un-intuitive perl > regex syntax, i believe many, if not exponentially MORE people would > like to have a better alternative. Do i want to remove the current > "well established" re module? No. But i would like to create a new > regex module that is more pythonic. A regex module that we can be > proud of. And just maybe, a regex module that "sets the bar" for all > other regular expressions.
Compact regex notations are inherently unpythonic. While your reimplementation may be more intuitive to you, I don't think that it's more pythonic at all. > Window dressing is important Ian, if not, then shop owners would not > continue to show displays in their shop windows. What does window > dressing do exactly? It attracts the masses, and without the masses > all merchants will eventually go out of buisness. Note: my argument > HAS NOTHING to do with the number of folks programming python (or any > language). The argument is focused on module sustainability in a > community. Modules that are morbidly DIFFICULT to learn do not last. Well, FWIW, I think that the current re module was easier for me to learn than your version would have been, mainly because the re module matches the syntax that I was already familiar with well before I started using Python. If you think you can do better, though, I encourage you to actually write your regex module and put it up on PyPI. > I know about PyParsing but i believe we have room for PyParsing and a > more Pythonic take on Perl style regular expressions. I don't see why > we could not keep all three. Let the people decide what is best for > them. PyParsing produces recursive descent parsers. It's an alternative to regular expressions for a different class of parsing problems, not a replacement, and so it's not particularly germane to this discussion. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
