anon luker wrote:

> Could you please explain your take on the relationship between regular
> expressions and dynamic parsers?  Or regular expressions and grammar
> specifications?  Your argument that Ruby needs language-level support
> for dynamic parsers seems to be based on one of these opaque
> relationships.
> 

A major part of all programming language use is parsing text in some 
fashion or another, basically it's a solved problem due to grammars and 
regex, it seems logical that if one includes regex support at the 
language level, it makes equal sense to give you all the parsing tools 
and allow easy interaction between grammar and embedded regex.  It makes 
it available to the programmer, it makes it easy, and it makes it less 
of a creative stretch.  IE it allows the programmer to think of certain 
programming tasks from a grammar perspective, in the same way one things 
of some tasks from a regex perspective.  It gives the programmer a 
larger vocabulary, without unecessarily complicating things for them.

That is why I am trying to push for this, but I think I'm not quite 
following your question.  Could you specify a little better, then 
perhaps I could answer better ;)

Charles Comstock