G'day Wacek,
On Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:19:46 +0100
Wacek Kusnierczyk <waclaw.marcin.kusnierc...@idi.ntnu.no> wrote:
> i think i did not suggest the original poster to learn perl.
As I see it, you didn't suggest anything to the original poster, at
least not directly. But, since these days you have to be subscribed
to r-help to post IIRC, it is probably reasonable to assume that the
original poster saw your posting.
> many responses on this list involve regular expressions, and regexes
> are so ubiquitous in code that has to do with parsing and processing
> text, be it filenames or loads of data, that a user of r may well
> want to learn a bit of this stuff in addition to the details about
> how real numbers are represented below the surface.
You should really get rid of that chip on your shoulder.
> you may want to keep saying 'use r where applicable instead of worse
> tools',
Now I am getting really confused, isn't your suggested solution not
using R too? So why would I say something like this? I suggest you get
rid of the chip on the other shoulder too... :)
> well, the regex syntax is fairly standard, though variations exist
> among languages.
Exactly, and the existence of these variations which can trip one up
and require to rtfm in anything but the most simplest situations,
that's why regexp are not what jumps first to my mind.
> i have seen quite a bunch of programs written by scientists who spent
> over one hundred lines of code on just parsing command line
> arguments; i wish they knew regexes exist (and better, getopt-like
> modules too). if you're doing serious programming without knowing
> regexes, you're rather lucky.
Probably depends on what one calls serious.
Best wishes,
Berwin
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