Re: [Vala] About regular expressions and pattern matching

["Levi Bard" <taktaktaktaktaktaktaktaktaktak gmail com>]

> > Thanks for a great language! I was wondering if you have plans to add
>  > first class regular expressions? They should be relatively simple to
>  > implement since the libs are there in Glib but they would make code much
>  > easier to read compared to calling functions. Replacements based on
>  > regular expressions could also be there like in Perl (and others).
>
>  I'm not sure whether this would really make code easier to read, it can
>  also have the opposite effect for people that don't know the syntax.
>  Anyway, we don't intend to extend the current syntax substantially in
>  the 0.3.x release cycle. We should discuss this after 1.0.

I agree that it would be convenient to have regex as a first-class data type.
I don't think that:
/(\d+)?\.\d+/ || /\.\d+/.match(inputStr)

is less readable than:
new Regex("/(\d+)?\.\d+/ || /\.\d+/").match(inputStr)

, and some integration with language constructs like loops and switch
statements would be fantastic.  After 1.0, of course. ;-)

-- 
"[...P]eople usually invent pseudo-languages that integrate into
XML, but then they end up duplicating full programming languages, with
an even uglier syntax." -- Mathias Gaunard
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html