[fpc-pascal] My favourite missing feature

[Marc Weustink]

Mattias Gaertner wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Dec 2008 01:41:16 +0200
> ik <idokan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> It looks for a date pattern like the follow
>>
>> 10/10/08 and 10/10/2008 with space and then some other chars as well.
>>
>> I think if it was with boundaries of begin and/or end (^ and $) it
>> would work even better.
>>
>> The () indicates groups. each group is the string extracted from the
>> pattern, and can be used (that's the /1/ and /2/ that he wrote).
>>
>> This entire thingy called regular expression or regex for short.
>>
>> Ido
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 1:17 AM, Marc Weustink <marc at dommelstein.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>>>
>>>> There seem to be a number of people currently making outrageous
>>>> suggestions about missing features or how FPC could best be
>>>> repackaged and promoted, so since it's the season of good will I
>>>> trust that folk will tolerate this one from me.
>>>>
>>>> There's been a recent thread in fpc-other on second languages, but
>>>> it appeared to focus more on what was a useful part of a
>>>> developer's skillset rather than what people miss from Pascal.
>>>>
>>>> What /I/ miss is Perl's pattern matching, and I miss it to the
>>>> extent that in some of my own scripting stuff I've implemented it
>>>> myself:
>>>>
>>>> IF cells[2, dateTime] = /(\d\d)\/(\d\d)\/((\d\d)?\d\d)\s.*/i THEN
>>>> BEGIN
>>>>
>>> and now in plain english, what does it match ?
> 
> see also
> http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/IDE_regular_expressions

I know what regular expressions are, I know that when you are writing 
them, you understand what you wanted to do, but 5 mins later you don't 
know anymore what it meant, let alone how to debug.

(no it wasn't a serious question)

Marc