Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: what should egrep '|root' print? (syntax/semantics) Message-ID: <1988Sep22.174344.14753@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <44414@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> <68203@sun.uucp> <8202@alice.UUCP> <410@quintus.UUCP> <8209@alice.UUCP> <857@yunexus.UUCP> <1988Sep20.043728.20198@utzoo.uucp> <454@quintus.UUCP> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 88 17:43:44 GMT In article <454@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: >Why not use (* ... ) as the meta-construct? The trouble is that the word brackets aren't always used together, so the trailing bracket needs to be distinguishable by itself. (* is attractive, but it has no obvious counterpart to be the closing bracket. >It is *already* the case that programs which generate patterns have to >go out of their way to avoid far too many magic sequences; a library like >this would eliminate the problem at the source. Actually, with my regexp package it suffices to backslash all the ordinary characters. A bit crude, but it works. This is one of the reasons why I am very reluctant to assign special meaning to any backslashed characters. -- NASA is into artificial | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology stupidity. - Jerry Pournelle | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu