I love regular expressions
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Memories? I still use it.
Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
Richard Attenborough voice in his semi-whisper: Behold, the rare COBOL programmer in the wild, they used to roam in giant herds but are now solitary creatures. What will become of the banking ecosystem when the species becomes extinct?
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated. I’m begging you for the benefit of everyone, don’t be STUPID.
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StarNamer@work wrote:
"why can't they just put the letters in alphabetical order so they're easy to find?"
A better question is "why are we so enslaved to tradition that we keep using a layout optimized for the Remington No 2 mechanical typewriter over 100 years ago?" And, please, don't get me started on the sexagesimal system used for time and degrees! :D
Mircea
Mircea Neacsu wrote:
why are we so enslaved to tradition that we keep using a layout optimized for the Remington No 2 mechanical typewriter over 100 years ago
I believe because, despite claims (and faked data), no alternative has been shown to actually be better. If I recall correct one of the magazines, either "Skeptical Inquirer" or "Skeptic" had at least one article in say the past 10 years that documented the history of that. Possible that there might be some that are as good as, but then that by itself is no reason to switch.
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The problem with regular expressions, is that most of us use them once every couple of years and we have to relearn everything from scratch every time. For someone who's doing RE everyday, it's simple; I used to have a boss that was like that; we all went to her to write/debug our RE. (and we never document the RE in the code :rolleyes: )
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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At least the non-backtracking subset. DFA regular expressions. - they are a compact way to describe a simple syntax - they are plain text and brief, easily communicatable and transferable - they are cross platform (at least DFA), running in most any engine - they are incredibly efficient (again, DFA) - they are versatile, able to do validation, tokenization, and matching as well That's probably why they will always be with us. They are maybe the perfect canonical execution of a Chomsky type 3 language. Sure, they can be really terse, but this is as much a strength as it is a weakness, because it facilitates some of the above. I know some people hate them, and I can understand that. But show me a better way.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
honey the codewitch wrote:
I know some people hate them,
I certainly don't hate them since I use them quite a bit. Of course no one provides a comment for what they are intended to match. Nor how the match works. But I have seen quite a few that I knew to be wrong. That is concerning.
honey the codewitch wrote:
- they are cross platform (at least DFA), running in most any engine
Not sure what you mean by that. The engine that runs the regex is the only 'cross platform' part possible in that. The regex expressions themselves depend only on the engine so the expression itself has nothing to do with the platform. Perhaps you were referring to that the simplest syntax works in different engines though. But once one uses something more complex that is not necessarily true. But at least with javascript, java and C# they to a great extent use the same syntax.
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Richard Attenborough voice in his semi-whisper: Behold, the rare COBOL programmer in the wild, they used to roam in giant herds but are now solitary creatures. What will become of the banking ecosystem when the species becomes extinct?
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated. I’m begging you for the benefit of everyone, don’t be STUPID.
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A long time ago I wrote a tool. The tool allowed you to multiply select portions of text and it would attempt to generate regexs that would only match the selected text It didn't work very well, at least my implementation but I think the idea has merit.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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At least the non-backtracking subset. DFA regular expressions. - they are a compact way to describe a simple syntax - they are plain text and brief, easily communicatable and transferable - they are cross platform (at least DFA), running in most any engine - they are incredibly efficient (again, DFA) - they are versatile, able to do validation, tokenization, and matching as well That's probably why they will always be with us. They are maybe the perfect canonical execution of a Chomsky type 3 language. Sure, they can be really terse, but this is as much a strength as it is a weakness, because it facilitates some of the above. I know some people hate them, and I can understand that. But show me a better way.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
I use regular expressions regularly. The downside is that it is difficult for newcomers to understand them. But as long as you add comments to your code it shouldn't be a problem. And many languages allow you to add comments WITHIN the regular expressions, making them even easier to understand. (I frequently create my regexes with comments in C# and then take out the comments afterwards, leaving the original version within commented-out code.)
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As an IoT person, you probably have done a lot of assembly language programming. I find that people who love regex tend to also like assembly (including myself). I find regex very elegant, and immensely powerful.
Da Bomb
I actually avoid assembly wherever I can. We have so many different MCUs that come along, and supply is questionable sometimes, which means switching chips mid project. I mean, Arm Cortex M to Arm Cortex M it's not the worst thing in the world, but you'd still have all the CMSIS stuff you'd have to deal with. Ergo, I abstract, and use C++ with ZephyrRTOS for my projects.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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:) close cobol brings back a lot programming memories
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day" Badfinger
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honey the codewitch wrote:
I know some people hate them,
I certainly don't hate them since I use them quite a bit. Of course no one provides a comment for what they are intended to match. Nor how the match works. But I have seen quite a few that I knew to be wrong. That is concerning.
honey the codewitch wrote:
- they are cross platform (at least DFA), running in most any engine
Not sure what you mean by that. The engine that runs the regex is the only 'cross platform' part possible in that. The regex expressions themselves depend only on the engine so the expression itself has nothing to do with the platform. Perhaps you were referring to that the simplest syntax works in different engines though. But once one uses something more complex that is not necessarily true. But at least with javascript, java and C# they to a great extent use the same syntax.
jschell wrote:
Not sure what you mean by that.
What I mean is that regardless of the platform you choose, there is a way to run a DFA regular expression on it. And yeah, that encompasses many different engines, which themselves are what run on a particular platform, unless you're doing code generation, which I do sometimes for them so I don't have to include the regex engine in my firmware. That code is easy to make cross platform. You'd almost have to put in extra effort to make it otherwise. :) I was maybe trying to be too brief by half. I assumed the meaning would come through, but I guess not.
jschell wrote:
Perhaps you were referring to that the simplest syntax works in different engines though
In part yes, but also, virtually every platform has a DFA regex engine for it, or alternatively you can generate DFA code for that platform, with something such as my rxcg project. I was intending to imply that as well.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I have worked at several companies where I was the only one that could do bit fiddling/manipulation. I have worked with developers that did not even know what that was. But I do regexes also.
I have a love hate relationship with bit twiddling. I don't mind writing that code, but I hate having to read it. And I hate the process of commenting it because it tends to take a compact thing and make it necessarily verbose.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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honey the codewitch wrote:
A long time ago I wrote a tool.
Not so long ago I wrote a tool ... Now I'm unemployed :(
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants" Chuckles the clown
That's why you keep your tool to yourself. :laugh:
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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At least the non-backtracking subset. DFA regular expressions. - they are a compact way to describe a simple syntax - they are plain text and brief, easily communicatable and transferable - they are cross platform (at least DFA), running in most any engine - they are incredibly efficient (again, DFA) - they are versatile, able to do validation, tokenization, and matching as well That's probably why they will always be with us. They are maybe the perfect canonical execution of a Chomsky type 3 language. Sure, they can be really terse, but this is as much a strength as it is a weakness, because it facilitates some of the above. I know some people hate them, and I can understand that. But show me a better way.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Being a compact way to describe something is very much the problem. That is exactly why people hate them. You can't just read one and know what it does, nor expect that of your colleagues. Every time I add a RegEx to the code, I have to add an explanation of what it does. Just like in code: if it needs comments to be readable, something's very wrong.
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Mircea Neacsu wrote:
why are we so enslaved to tradition that we keep using a layout optimized for the Remington No 2 mechanical typewriter over 100 years ago
I believe because, despite claims (and faked data), no alternative has been shown to actually be better. If I recall correct one of the magazines, either "Skeptical Inquirer" or "Skeptic" had at least one article in say the past 10 years that documented the history of that. Possible that there might be some that are as good as, but then that by itself is no reason to switch.
I recall this too. Qwerty I heard was in part laid out to slow typists down so the mechanical typewriter could keep up. I heard it from the Beagle Bros back in the 1980s so I don't know how true it is. Either way, presumably eventually that wasn't an issue anymore. And Devorak was a common alternative, or at least common as qwerty alternatives go. It was touted as better, but despite the hype I remember reading that it didn't actually improve people's WPM.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Being a compact way to describe something is very much the problem. That is exactly why people hate them. You can't just read one and know what it does, nor expect that of your colleagues. Every time I add a RegEx to the code, I have to add an explanation of what it does. Just like in code: if it needs comments to be readable, something's very wrong.
Jeroen_R wrote:
if it needs comments to be readable, something's very wrong.
That's true in the general case, but the exceptions are legion. I'd argue regex is one of those exceptions. There is simply not a more compact and efficient way to tokenize or match flat text than DFA regular expressions. Sure you could try writing it out, but I have. Try your hand at creating a more verbose language than regex and see what it looks like. I wrote one that allows you to describe regular expressions using a BNF notation variant. The result required too much typing, let's put it that way, even though BNF is fairly compact as well. If there's a better mousetrap, nobody seems to have found it yet.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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That's why you keep your tool to yourself. :laugh:
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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At least the non-backtracking subset. DFA regular expressions. - they are a compact way to describe a simple syntax - they are plain text and brief, easily communicatable and transferable - they are cross platform (at least DFA), running in most any engine - they are incredibly efficient (again, DFA) - they are versatile, able to do validation, tokenization, and matching as well That's probably why they will always be with us. They are maybe the perfect canonical execution of a Chomsky type 3 language. Sure, they can be really terse, but this is as much a strength as it is a weakness, because it facilitates some of the above. I know some people hate them, and I can understand that. But show me a better way.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
This is the most runaway thread on CP in a long while. Way to poke the bear.
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At least the non-backtracking subset. DFA regular expressions. - they are a compact way to describe a simple syntax - they are plain text and brief, easily communicatable and transferable - they are cross platform (at least DFA), running in most any engine - they are incredibly efficient (again, DFA) - they are versatile, able to do validation, tokenization, and matching as well That's probably why they will always be with us. They are maybe the perfect canonical execution of a Chomsky type 3 language. Sure, they can be really terse, but this is as much a strength as it is a weakness, because it facilitates some of the above. I know some people hate them, and I can understand that. But show me a better way.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
I blank out on regular expressions. Too much like learning a new language. The other day, I needed to get 0 or more leading characters from a string (as an int). I Googled (regex), I went, I left. Coding challenge: get leading digits (I settled for LINQ)
var text = "123rd NY 2nd Battalion".
//
var count = text.TakeWhile( c => Char.IsDigit( c ) ).Count();
int i = count > 0 ? ConvertToInt32( text.SubString( 0, count) ) : 0;Answer: 123
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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It's because I slept. :) But yeah, I get bit overwhelmed when I get a lot of responses, so I kind of respond as I'm able.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t participate in the conversation, rather that the topic usually starts up a lively discussion. :cool:
Time is the differentiation of eternity devised by man to measure the passage of human events. - Manly P. Hall Mark Just another cog in the wheel
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I blank out on regular expressions. Too much like learning a new language. The other day, I needed to get 0 or more leading characters from a string (as an int). I Googled (regex), I went, I left. Coding challenge: get leading digits (I settled for LINQ)
var text = "123rd NY 2nd Battalion".
//
var count = text.TakeWhile( c => Char.IsDigit( c ) ).Count();
int i = count > 0 ? ConvertToInt32( text.SubString( 0, count) ) : 0;Answer: 123
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
^[0-9]+
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix