On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> On Sun, 2001-11-04 at 14:31, Todd Gillespie wrote:
> > You don't know the power of the dark side of regexes.
> 
> Would one rather muck with regex's for 5 hours to get the task done, or
> spend 20 minutes tops writing a simple parser?

Would one rather spend some quality time learning to use regexes fully, or
spend an indefinite amount of time debugging your one-off parser?

I'm just guessing here, but I bet you personally don't network your apps
by writing ethernet headers.

> > I just don't agree that the proper thing to do is to encourage everyone to
> > write their own parsers for each task.  Most of us are trying to move
> > *away* from C-style per byte mucking.  Certainly Albert shouldn't ignore
> > his SAFE flags, but that's hardly grounds to abandon generalized parsing
> > engines.
> 
> If there were an effective generalized parsing engine, it wouldn't be
> necessary.

Look around.


And have a nice weekend --oops. Enjoy the week.