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I added this to the Alternative Regex Syntax wiki page with about a dozen similar projects: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Regex-Syntax https

by chubot 4y ago

I added this to the Alternative Regex Syntax wiki page with about a dozen similar projects: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Regex-Syntax https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Regex-Synta... e.g. compare with Melody 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30358554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30358554 and Oil's Eggex: https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/eggex.html https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/eggex.html From a quick glance Rulex looks very similar to Eggex! A difference is that Eggex is embedded in a shell so you can use normal assignment statements to build up subpatterns. And you can also interpolate directly into an 'egrep' or 'awk' command.

runlevel1 4y ago
What I'm liking about Rulex is that it's striking a good balance between what's new (mainly readability improvements) and what's familiar. It's close enough to Regex that I could probably get used to it in a few hours. Looking through the items on that list, IMO only Oil's Eggex seems to hit that same sweet spot.
- chubot 4y ago
  Yes that's my assessment too! Funny thing is that I designed a similar project called "Annex" in Python around 2014. But when I looked back on it after a few years with fresh eyes, it was just too different! It was hard to remember. So Eggex is very similar to the common syntax -- it's actually roughly the same as lex or re2c. I think there's a case to make that we we ALREADY have a good syntax for regexes in lexer generators -- it's just the POSIX/Perl syntax that is bad! The other thing about Annex is that it was a Python library, and it was never worth the extra dependency. (IMO PyPI has a lot of friction.) That is, after writing it, I already knew stdlib re syntax so well it wasn't worth it :) But Eggex is in a shell, which is a context that makes a lot of sense IMO.

by chubot 4y ago

runlevel1 4y ago

What I'm liking about Rulex is that it's striking a good balance between what's new (mainly readability improvements) and what's familiar. It's close enough to Regex that I could probably get used to it in a few hours. Looking through the items on that list, IMO only Oil's Eggex seems to hit that same sweet spot.

chubot 4y ago
Yes that's my assessment too! Funny thing is that I designed a similar project called "Annex" in Python around 2014. But when I looked back on it after a few years with fresh eyes, it was just too different! It was hard to remember. So Eggex is very similar to the common syntax -- it's actually roughly the same as lex or re2c. I think there's a case to make that we we ALREADY have a good syntax for regexes in lexer generators -- it's just the POSIX/Perl syntax that is bad! The other thing about Annex is that it was a Python library, and it was never worth the extra dependency. (IMO PyPI has a lot of friction.) That is, after writing it, I already knew stdlib re syntax so well it wasn't worth it :) But Eggex is in a shell, which is a context that makes a lot of sense IMO.