Re: Off Topic (was: bug#31544)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 24 May 2018 16:35:34 +0000
> Cc: Noam Postavsky <address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>   address@hidden
> From: Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden>
> 
> rx.el uses a wordy syntax, somewhat analagously to Cobol 50 years ago.
> Its premiss is that it's the terse, dense, austere characters which make
> a regexp difficult to write and read.  I would suggest that it's more
> the abstract concepts which cause beginners difficulties, rather than
> the syntax.  This was true of Cobol 50 years ago, and I think it's
> always been the case with regexps.

I actually agree with the premise: reading an rx spec of a regexp is
much easier than reading the regexp itself.

> That said, rx.el is used ~72 times in 19 files.el in Emacs, so somebody
> likes it.

I certainly do (but I'm not responsible for those uses).