3 ms·

Adding to what you said, I also find Plan9 regular expressions to be significantly easier to grok in your head compared to POSIX or PCRE regular expressions tha

by 4ad 15y ago

Adding to what you said, I also find Plan9 regular expressions to be significantly easier to grok in your head compared to POSIX or PCRE regular expressions that push a lot of complexity on the user's side (PCREs are not even true regexps as PCREs are not regular). Plan9 regexps are very easy to reason about, more explicit and don't look as line noise as much.

omaranto 15y ago
I thought POSIX regexes allowed back references (as in "(*.)\1"), so they aren't regular either.
adobriyan 15y ago
RE with backreferences is strictly more powerful then RE without them. Implying that PCRE is somehow inferior due to backreferences support is quite fuddy.