[Haskell] regular expression syntax - perl ain't got nothin on haskell

[Graham Klyne]

At 18:07 23/02/04 -0800, John Meacham wrote:
>It provides regular and monadic versions, a very overloaded and useful
>interface, as well as extensibility. although currently the only
>instance  is based on Text.Regex, it generalizes to matching lists of
>arbitrary type, not just strings, and also leaves the door open for
>compile-time checked and optimized regular expressions via template
>Haskell.

I have a concern here that I hope you won't see as a negative response to 
your ideas...

I recently ran into some problems porting some Haskell code to Windows 
because it used the Text.Regex library, which is dependent on a Unix-only 
system.  If Haskell is to embrace the use of Regexes to a level comparable 
with (say) Perl, I think it is important that the underlying library is 
available on all platforms on which Haskell is supported, or I fear that a 
large swathe of Haskell support libraries will be unavailable to programs 
running on Windows.

So my point would be that, to be most useful to the Haskell community, your 
effort should also be supported by a Text.Regex implementation (or 
alternative) for Windows systems.

#g


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Graham Klyne
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