Re: RFE: support POSIX standard and developing RE's

On 12.04.16 21:15, Christian Brabandt wrote:
> On Di, 12 Apr 2016, L. A. Walsh wrote:
> > If vim supported posix extended RE's,

Some of us have been asking for that for around a decade now.
So many unix utilities support POSIX "Modern" EREs, that it is the best
standard to conform to. There's then only one regex dialect to learn.
(Queue horn fanfare and singing angels)

> The thing is, Vims RE support atoms, that other RE engines do not
> support. Think about e.g. \_. \< \%l \%'m

Never heard of 'em, and don't waste wet RAM on dialect tricks which
won't work in grep and awk, and ... , as it just leads to frustration.

> That makes adding another RE engine hard.

If so, it's only hard once, not every day, as with cross-tool regex
chaos.

It is Unix which "is the IDE", not any single application. The "Eclectic
Rubbish Lister" has wandered off into insular dialect land.
Unfortunately Vim has committed the same folly. Now it is time to pay
the piper.

Where to from here, then? To bring order, can we not _finally_ adopt
POSIX EREs, adding the parochial \_. \< \%l \%'m stuff as extensions?

I did compile Vim with a POSIX ERE regex engine many years ago. It
worked fine, but the help broke, there wasn't time to fix that, and I
only used it for a couple of months.

So substituting an improved RE engine is not difficult. Extending that
to add vimishness might take a little longer, but it has been done in
the existing engine. It would be wonderful if that could be done in my
lifetime.

Personally, I'd settle for a compile option which simply substituted
POSIX EREs, without breaking the help. The vimishness could then go
hang. Would that also suffice for the others advocating POSIX ?

A subsequent step might then be to add vimishness, and make the new
engine mainstream? VEREs anyone?

Erik

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