Home Original page

PyWart: Python regular expression syntax is not intuitive.

Rick Johnson rantingrickjohnson at gmail.com
Wed Jan 25 17:26:54 EST 2012 
On Jan 25, 3:41 pm, Duncan Booth <duncan.bo... at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> Rick Johnson <rantingrickjohn... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Jan 25, 2:17ÿpm, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 10:16 AM, Rick Johnson
>
> >> Did you read the very first sentence of the re module documentation?
> >> "This module provides regular expression matching operations *similar
> >> to those found in Perl*" (my emphasis). ÿThe goal here is
> >> compatibility with existing RE syntaxes, not readability. ÿPerl uses
> >> the (?...) syntax, so the re module does too.
>
> > @Duncan and Ian:
> > Did you not read the title of my post? :o) " Python regular expression
> > syntax is not intuitive." While i understand WHERE the syntax
> > orientations from, that fact does not solve the problem. The syntax is
> > not intuitive, and Python should ALWAYS be intuitive! We should always
> > borrow ideas from anyone (even our enemies) when those ideas support
> > our ideology. Perl style regexes are not Pythonic. They violate our
> > philosophy in too many places.
>
> Or we could implement de-facto standards where they exist.

Are you so naive as to think that the Perl folks are even *slightly*
interested in intuitive regexps? Have you written, or even read, any
Perl code my friend? The *standards* are broken. Obviously they don't
care, or they prefer the esoteric nature of their cryptic creation.

> *plonk*

And good day to you.
More information about the Python-list mailing list