Re: [PATCH take 3 0/4] color-words improvements

From: Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <bss@iguanasuicide.net>
Date: Jan 14, 2009, 22:24 UTC
Message-ID: <200901141624.38315.bss@iguanasuicide.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0901142258250.3586@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

On Wednesday 2009 January 14 16:06:48 Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

>On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Thomas Rast wrote:
>> Bug aside, examples like this one make me wonder if we should force a
>> "last resort" match for `[^[:space:]]`.  For example,
>>
>>       -aaa [aaa]
>>       +aaa (aaa) aaa
>>
>> would still give you
>>
>>       aaa (aaa)<GREEN> aaa<RESET>
>>
>> which may be unexpected.
>
>But why should it be unexpected?  If people say that every length of "a"
>makes a word, and consequently everything else is clutter, then that's
>that, no?

I think some people are going to have problems with the strict dichotomy between "part of a word" and "ignorable whitespace" that is being set up. It makes sense technically, but it could confuse.

Imagine with --diff-words=[A-Z][A-Za-z]* and the following change: -To be Or Not To be. +To ignore Or Not To treat whitespace differently.

I think there is value in being able to ignore anything that's not a word, so the documentation that mentions adding '|[^[:space:]]' to your regex seems sufficient to me.

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