<HEAD><TITLE>discuss@charon: [39] in "Coldmud discussion meeting"</TITLE>
<H1>[39] in Coldmud discussion meeting</H1></HEAD>
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<HR><H2>Re: parsing</H2>
<H3>daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tue Nov 16 19:52:01 1993
)</H3>
<PRE>
From: joe@unipress.com
To: stewarta@netcom.com (Alex Stewart)
Cc: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 16 Nov 93 14:49:28 PST."
             &lt;199311162249.OAA14624@mail.netcom.com&gt; 
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 93 19:35:47 -0500


&gt; On the subject of regexps:  I also tend to lean towards not including regexp
&gt; matching simply because it's been my experience that people who understand
&gt; them tend to lean far too heavily on them, and they're often not the best 
&gt; tool for the job (except for quite complicated tasks, which can often be
&gt; broken up into a set of simpler tasks, leading to increased readability and 
&gt; more easily modifyable systems).

The same argument could be made against the exception handling system in C--,
or fork() in MOO.  Features of great utility shouldn't be left out for the
reason that they might be abused.

&gt; MUDs, after all, are not text editors or
&gt; command-line search programs, and do have their own programming languages
&gt; which work quite nicely at many of the more sophisticated tasks regexps were
&gt; designed for.

It's worse; text editors and command line search programs ARE BUILT WITHIN
MUDs!

My point:  if you don't like regexps, avoid them.  They are important tools to
me, and it would appear to some other programmers too, so I feel I should
lobby for their inclusion.  I feel that I am beginning to over-lobby a bit
here -- I've spoken my thoughts, so now I'll shut up.

-K*
</PRE>
