[42] in Coldmud discussion meeting

Re: Regular expressions

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wed Nov 17 04:30:40 1993 )

To: coldstuff@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 16 Nov 1993 17:31:55 EST."
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1993 03:23:29 -0600
From: Adam Harris <harris@cs.uchicago.edu>

I'd like to cast a vote of in-server regexp routines.  
It's true that they are "unreadable" to some average, untutored user.
On the other hand, it seems like there's a huge base of people
who know and use "regular expressions".  It's implemented all over
the place (aside from emacs, already mentioned, there's perl, grep,
MOO implementations, for a start).  And to those users---like myself---
grep descriptions are *decodable*, if not entirely readable.

This is not to say that, in general, we should restrict ourselves
to what is currently the standard.  That would be a mistake.  But in
this case I feel the standard is a reasonably good one.  At least, 
I haven't really seen better one.  

(How many times have I wished MS Word had reg-exps!  Ah, serves me
right.)

> > Fifth, I'm kind of wary of totally in-server robots.  I think that
> > decision mechanisms in robots should generally be done client-side
> > (there are plenty of client tools for this).
> 
> In my experience, in-server robots are the way to go.  Client robots just
> can't get at the information as expediently or easily using text-only
> protocols.  Client robots also require the implementation in a different
> language than the system which they are interfacing with, which deters
> otherwise creative users.
> 

Could someone give me a clue on what a "client robot" is?

.......................................................Adam Harris
............................................harris@cs.uchicago.edu