[swift-evolution] Empower String type with regular expression

Brent Royal-Gordon brent at architechies.com
Sun Feb 7 16:13:55 CST 2016


> Further, I highly recommend checking out Perl 6’s regular expressions.  They are a community that has had an obsessive passion for regular expressions, and in Perl 6 they were given the chance to reinvent the wheel based on what they learned.  What they came up with is very powerful, and pretty good all around.

As someone who learned to argue about language design on perl6-language, you have my interest. :^)

How far do you want to go here? In the small, Perl 6 redesigned regex syntax to remove certain syntactic hacks and make more common operations more accessible; in the medium, they introduced extensibility and reusability with named rules; in the large, they made grammars of named rules a first-class language feature; and in the very large, they turned the parsing of Perl itself into a Perl grammar you could subclass and modify for metaprogramming. #1 and #4 are very different propositions.

-- 
Brent Royal-Gordon
Architechies



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