On Sun, 2001-11-04 at 23:04, Bill Kelly wrote:
> 
> From: "Sean Middleditch" <elanthis / awesomeplay.com>
> >
> > On Sun, 2001-11-04 at 21:00, Todd Gillespie wrote:
> > > Would one rather spend some quality time learning to use regexes fully, or
> > > spend an indefinite amount of time debugging your one-off parser?
> > 
> > If it takes more time to make such a freakin simplistic parser, the
> > programmer should consider a different career.  Jesus, I wrote things
> > like that when I was 12.  And no, I probably don't know the full extent
> > of regex's, but since most real code is a hell of a lot easier to debug
> > and faster and more powerful than what regex's can do, or much less were
> > designed to, I'll keep regex's where they belong and use some real code
> > to get the real work done.
> 
> Hmm, it was a toss-up between,
> 
> "I find your lack of faith disturbing."
> 
> and
> 
> "Come over to the dark side.  I am your father's brother's nephew's
> cousin's former roommate."

Dude, that girl is a freak.  I hope you're not her.  ~,^

> 
> :-)
> 
> We just replaced what was a 600+ line inflexible, subset-of-HTML-compliant
> lexer-in-Java, with a few lines of regexp.  The regexp version is HTML 4.0
> compliant (and passes all its unit tests :)

Well, that certainly is an achievement.  I can see where regex's would be
better for a task like that.

> 
> And so we all wrote parsers the hard way when we were twelve.  But regexps
> have a lot to offer, even if they can't, indeed, do everything.
> 
> And they look a lot, lot less cryptic after grokking a few rules and
> patterns about how they're put together.

Yes, but for the CSV thing, and a lot of other tasks, the regex's are a lot
more complicated and less efficient than a simplistic hand-written parser.  I
certainly wouldn't suggest writing one's own parser for, say, Java; but neither
would I suggest using a regex.  ^,^


> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Darth Bill
> 
> 

Sean Etc.