4 ms·

I still don't agree, although I respect both of your opinions as real regex implementors without a doubt. It's just too complex a 'standard'. The amount of cra

I still don't agree, although I respect both of your opinions as real regex implementors without a doubt. It's just too complex a 'standard'. The amount of crap they had to 'retract' by the current version is telling, and features like 3.9 and 3.11 are speculative design by standards committee, which is the exact opposite of how these things should work. It's the ultimate unfunded mandate: "hooray, I'm writing a standard, why don't I shove some random crap in there that no-one implements now in existing libraries in the hope I get to set directions". The standard should be minimal and well-defined. This is neither. It's also preposterously self-important. Yeah, I'm so fascinated by the history of the Unicode standard I'm going to start introducing an "age" property so I can regex-match on when characters were entered. There's a certain attitude whereby these guys are just blithely shoveling junk into a standard that no-one needs. If you're desperate for all these exotic character properties put them in a godamn file as a character class and blat them in wherever you need them (yes, it would be nice if regex had macros). Somewhere in all this nonsense is a good standard struggling to get out. They need to shit or get off the pot. Anything that they don't know how to do or that no-one knows how to do should be completely deleted. Anything that they offer 15 different choices as to how to do ... they need to figure out which is the best one and pick that. It's a standards documents, it's supposed to make choices, it's not a potted plant.

jonstewart 8y ago
It has a bad case of featuritis; it reads both discursively and self-consciously, like it knows that there's really no justification for using regexps to specify named properties, but it just can't help itself. Some of the Level 3 features venture too far afield from Unicode, too, e.g., 3.11 is "implement YACC" and has nothing to do with Unicode and 3.7 is "implement a streaming regexp engine, we dare you" (challenge accepted, Unicode dweebs!). So, it is a horrible standard by which to judge overall conformance, but no one really does that. I think the value is in lighting the way through a broad array of thorny Unicode topics. And I think that the implementor who grapples with a majority subset of the sensible topics will wind up with an engine that handles users' Unicode needs.

jonstewart 8y ago

It has a bad case of featuritis; it reads both discursively and self-consciously, like it knows that there's really no justification for using regexps to specify named properties, but it just can't help itself. Some of the Level 3 features venture too far afield from Unicode, too, e.g., 3.11 is "implement YACC" and has nothing to do with Unicode and 3.7 is "implement a streaming regexp engine, we dare you" (challenge accepted, Unicode dweebs!). So, it is a horrible standard by which to judge overall conformance, but no one really does that. I think the value is in lighting the way through a broad array of thorny Unicode topics. And I think that the implementor who grapples with a majority subset of the sensible topics will wind up with an engine that handles users' Unicode needs.