Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ulowell!apollo!arnold
From: arnold@apollo.COM (Ken Arnold)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: POSIX Regular Expression Funnyness
Keywords: Regular Expression,POSIX
Message-ID: <41247a3f.ae48@apollo.COM>
Date: 28 Jan 89 23:16:00 GMT
References: <4118f7b1.ae48@apollo.COM> <8843@alice.UUCP>
Reply-To: arnold@apollo.COM (Ken Arnold)
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, MA
Lines: 16

In article <8843@alice.UUCP> andrew@alice.UUCP (Andrew Hume) writes:
>the new ctype style goo in regular expressions only applies inside
>[] expressions in order to ease compatability problems.

Andrew, Puh-lease!  In my article I stated why I didn't think this is
a problem, and asked what I'd missed.  What, pray tell, is *worse*
about the compatibility problems with "[:alpha:]" than with "[[:alpha:]]"?
Note that the second expression is also currently legal, although (I
suspect), just as unlikely to appear in practice as the first.

>the thing that pisses me off is that they want to make \c where c is
>a regular (non-special) character exactly equivalent to c, ...

Yeah, I agree with you on that.  This makes little sense.

		Ken Arnold