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Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544)
From: |
Alan Mackenzie |
Subject: |
Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544) |
Date: |
Thu, 24 May 2018 16:35:34 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.9.4 (2018-02-28) |
Hello, Richard.
On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 22:48:59 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> > > We have such things but we haven't adopted any of them in Emacs itself.
> > Doesn't rx.el qualify?
> It's an example of what I said. We have it, but we don't actually use it
> much if at all. This suggests to me that it has drawbacks which prevent
> it from being clearly superior.
rx.el uses a wordy syntax, somewhat analagously to Cobol 50 years ago.
Its premiss is that it's the terse, dense, austere characters which make
a regexp difficult to write and read. I would suggest that it's more
the abstract concepts which cause beginners difficulties, rather than
the syntax. This was true of Cobol 50 years ago, and I think it's
always been the case with regexps.
That said, rx.el is used ~72 times in 19 files.el in Emacs, so somebody
likes it.
> If someone comes up with a replacement syntax that reduces the drawbacks,
> we might start using it all the time.
I don't think this will happen. At least, I hope not. ;-)
> --
> Dr Richard Stallman
> President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
- Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Van L, 2018/05/22
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Richard Stallman, 2018/05/22
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Van L, 2018/05/22
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Noam Postavsky, 2018/05/23
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Richard Stallman, 2018/05/23
- Re: Off Topic, Robert Pluim, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic, Eli Zaretskii, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic, Robert Pluim, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic, Eli Zaretskii, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic, Richard Stallman, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544),
Alan Mackenzie <=
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Yuri Khan, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Alan Mackenzie, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Noam Postavsky, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic, Stefan Monnier, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Richard Stallman, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Richard Stallman, 2018/05/24
- Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544), Eli Zaretskii, 2018/05/24