Re: Add some aliases for re-related functions

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 03.05.2020 01:49, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > > [ I'm trying to use "search" and "match" in the way it's used in
> > >     traditional regexp libraries.  ]
> > Guess I'm unfamiliar with said libraries. I'd suggest re-looking-at and
> > re-looking-back (or whatever, like, don't create an alias for the last
> > one if we don't want to).
>
> Most of the literature on regular expressions concentrates on the
> problem of finding whether a given string matches a given regexp, where
> "matching" here means that the regexp matches the whole string.

Right. Buffers are an Emacs specific.

> Think of it as the case where the regexp starts with \` and ends with \'
>
> Then there's the relaxation of "finding the longest match" (what we
> call `looking-at`) and then "finding the leftmost longest match" (what
> we call `string-match`).

looking-at being a special case of re-search-forward, I take?

> Those two have traditionally be named `re_match` and `re_search`
> respectively in C libraries (as can be seen in `src/regexp-emacs.c`).

Yes, ok. But we also need names to distinguish that things happen in a 
buffer. So far we've used 'search' for those.

Using the term 'search' for matching in strings might be a significant 
change, given existing expectations.

> PS: BTW, `looking-back` doesn't do a "match" of the "longest match that
> ends at point" but a "search" for the "rightmost longest match that ends
> at point" since it uses `re-search-backward` internally.

It's a weird function, I agree. Though it's proved to be a handy one.