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

On Thursday, March 24, 2016 at 5:27:35 AM UTC-5, L. A. Walsh wrote:
> Posix, has 2 official RE's already, the modern REs( like in
> grep -E, (extended RE's)
> and "obsolete RE's" as found in ed, called "basic REs".
>
> Additionally for the past few years, more gnu utils (like grep -P)
> have started supporting a third type of RE's called
> PCRE [Perl Compatible RE's] that seem to be on their way
> to becoming a 3rd official type of RE.
>
> Would it be possible to add the 3 RE's (w/appropriate flags)
> to invoke those standardized expressions (not as a replacement
> for any of the existing RE's), but w/different flags.
>
> This would allow those who know the posix-compat RE's that
> are becoming more wide spread in usage, and would allow for
> easier, direct usage (cut&paste) of the alternate RE's specifically
> to make it easer to define these expressions in shell-vars and/or
> vim-macros to allow for easier portability and usability between
> vim and other posix & gnu utils? Note in the past few years,
> the pcreRE's have also added python-specific features to the
> syntax to allow for easier porting of python features.
>
> Probably (or maybe) best of all, as all of these RE's are
> becoming more prevalent in posix, unix and linux environments,
> it would be a great benefit for people to be able to switch
> to alternate RE's based on familiarity and and the greater
> uniformity in these classes.
>
> Seems this would lower the learning curve for RE usage in
> vim where it often, idiosyncratically differs from such,
> requiring much trial and error and wasted time to get
> equivalent vim-compat-RE's that are equivalent to other
> industry standard RE's.
>
> Anyway, thought I'd mention this, since vim already has
> multiple incompatible RE's with existing standards and
> thought that providing a few "new POSIX-compat RE's" would
> only help in making vim easier to use.
>
> Thanks for your time!
> -linda
>
>
> Of course,

I wonder if a different approach might help.

Vim already has :perldo, :pydo, etc. Perhaps a :perlmatch, :pymatch, etc. could be added for basic searching in those languages?

There is also a patch in the todo list for :bvimgrep. Maybe a :bgrep command could also be added. I think that would allow searching the current buffer using whatever tool you like.

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