Re: Scan of regexps in Emacs (March 17)

[Richard Stallman]

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  > [ I wish Elisp regexps just used \ as an escape char in ranges instead
  >   of relying on those special convention of where `-` and `]` can appear
  >   in order to count as themselves.  ]

It might have been better, but we can't change it.  Even when first
implementing this in Emacs, I was following historical practice which
was later codified into standards.

  > I wonder why the doc doesn't just say that `-` should be the last
  > character and not mention the other possibilities which just make the
  > rule unnecessarily complex.

It could be reasonable to document that putting it at the beginning or
the end is the right way.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)