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0 pointsstaycoolboy5y ago0 comments

Perl was my first encounter with regular expressions. To this day, no language I've used does it better and cleaner. This includes Python, Boost/C++, Java, JavaScript, LISP, Go and Rust.

0 comments

aduitsis5y ago

Favorite syntactic sugar feature: the /x modifier which makes the regex ignore spaces and comments, meaning you can break your regex into multiple lines and comment them.

staycoolboyOP5y ago

Have you ever read O'Reilly's "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Friedl? He does a deep dive into the weird guts of regex modifiers.

I was obsessed with that book one summer and wrote a bunch of parsers after learning incremental techniques (/o I think), and then 8 months later I could no longer remember how anything that I wrote worked. Lol me.

cutler5y ago

Friedl's masterpiece was my introduction to server-side programming in 2000. I'd been doing front-end for a few years with Dreamweaver and I was looking-up it's find & replace features in "Dreamweaver Bible 8" where regexes were mentioned as the ultimate weapon. "Mastering Regular Expressions" was referenced in a footnote and fortunately my local library had a copy. My mind was blown. Regex symbols were just so powerful and the examples were mainly written in Perl which added even more power to them. The book was part of O'Reilly's Perl bookshelf so in addition to Friedl's book I bought the other Perl classics - "Programming Perl", "Perl Cookbook", "Mastering Algorithms with Perl" and "Learning Perl". With CPAN downloaded to my local disk I felt like a hitch-hiker setting out on a journey around the world needing nothing more than Perl in my backpack. Those were the days. Now I have to download 200Mb of node_modules before I can get started.

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lizmat5y ago

FWIW, this is the default in Raku regular expressions.

aduitsis5y ago

Oh, thank you, didn't know that!

staycoolboyOP5y ago

Raku is Perl programming language so that makes sense.

lizmat5y ago

If you're interested in improved regular expressions, I wuold suggest you have a look at Raku's regular expressions and grammars (formerly known as Perl 6): https://docs.raku.org/language/regexes

laichzeit05y ago

Agreed. Regex is a “part of the language” not a bolt on library like you have in Python. It’s one of those cases where you don’t even know how crap regex is in another language if you’ve never used Perl.

staycoolboyOP5y ago

I mentioned Boost's Regex in C++ (boost is essentially a different language), but I didn't bother to mention my experiments with regex in C, for example:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160308115653/http://peope.net/o...

I mean, you can do it, it just lacks elegance. And TBH, I still prefer C for lots of things.

sysread5y ago

You should check out janet-lang.org. It's got built in peg parsing.

freedomben5y ago

Awk and Ruby aren't on your list, any experience with those that you could compare/contrast with Perl?

staycoolboyOP5y ago

Awk is very similar in syntax, but doesn't provide the sophistication of match vs subst, and doesn't support suffix modifiers.

I only used Ruby briefly over 20 years ago so I can't comment.

marcosdumay5y ago

I do recommend Haskell. (But do not go into regexes first!)

But even though it has a similar powerful set of operations for regular expressions, people mostly don't use it, because there are better ways to deal with text.

cutler5y ago

Funny you should mention Haskell as it was used to bootstrap one of the early versions of Perl 6 if I remember.

gbacon5y ago

Correct:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming)

totalperspectiv5y ago

You would like Crystal, it has similar regexes

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

aduitsis5y ago

Favorite syntactic sugar feature: the /x modifier which makes the regex ignore spaces and comments, meaning you can break your regex into multiple lines and comment them.

staycoolboyOP5y ago

Have you ever read O'Reilly's "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Friedl? He does a deep dive into the weird guts of regex modifiers.

cutler5y ago

1 more reply

lizmat5y ago

FWIW, this is the default in Raku regular expressions.

aduitsis5y ago

Oh, thank you, didn't know that!

staycoolboyOP5y ago

Raku is Perl programming language so that makes sense.

lizmat5y ago

If you're interested in improved regular expressions, I wuold suggest you have a look at Raku's regular expressions and grammars (formerly known as Perl 6): https://docs.raku.org/language/regexes

laichzeit05y ago

staycoolboyOP5y ago

I mentioned Boost's Regex in C++ (boost is essentially a different language), but I didn't bother to mention my experiments with regex in C, for example:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160308115653/http://peope.net/o...

I mean, you can do it, it just lacks elegance. And TBH, I still prefer C for lots of things.

sysread5y ago

You should check out janet-lang.org. It's got built in peg parsing.

freedomben5y ago

Awk and Ruby aren't on your list, any experience with those that you could compare/contrast with Perl?

staycoolboyOP5y ago

Awk is very similar in syntax, but doesn't provide the sophistication of match vs subst, and doesn't support suffix modifiers.

I only used Ruby briefly over 20 years ago so I can't comment.

marcosdumay5y ago

I do recommend Haskell. (But do not go into regexes first!)

But even though it has a similar powerful set of operations for regular expressions, people mostly don't use it, because there are better ways to deal with text.

cutler5y ago

Funny you should mention Haskell as it was used to bootstrap one of the early versions of Perl 6 if I remember.

gbacon5y ago

Correct:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming)

totalperspectiv5y ago

You would like Crystal, it has similar regexes

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse