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

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 14, 2009, 22:06 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0901142258250.3586@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>
In-Reply-To: <200901142059.09005.trast@student.ethz.ch>

Hi,

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Thomas Rast wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Teemu Likonen wrote:
> >     -aaa (aaa)
> >     +aaa (aaa) aaa
> 
> 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?

So people might be surprised, but then they should have said something like

	[-.+#@"'$%^&*([{<>~|]*[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9]*[-.+#@"'$%&*)\]}>|]*

instead.

Although I have to say that for some applications, it is a pity that even POSIX extended regular expressions knows neither lookahead nor lookbehind.

Which reminds me... should we activate REG_EXTENDED by default?

Ciao, Dscho