[fpc-pascal] My favourite missing feature

[ik]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 2:35 AM, Marc Weustink <marc at dommelstein.net> wrote:

> 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.



Funny, I'm not the original writer of the regex code, but I understood it.
It's just another language for text patterns, that's all. A more complicated
regex is harder to understand with that one I can agree, but like with
Pascal, if you learn the language (and not only the syntax), you can
understand most good written patterns.

Ido



>
>
> (no it wasn't a serious question)
>
> Marc
>
>
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