I suppose I can agree that adopting someone else's programming style is a form of voluntary cargo cult programming, but I do not believe that assembling your own style by considering various options and choosing those which you consider to be the best for you would be CC (even if the end result happens to be identical to someone else's style).

As to the merits of always using the switches, they all come at the expense of changing the regex semantics to be different from the standard/default semantics. I do not consider this to be "little to no expense". When there are defined standards and well-known semantics, I find it much better to stick with them where possible and only deviate when needed rather than making deviation the default.

In reply to Re^2: Best practice or cargo cult? by dsheroh
in thread Best practice or cargo cult? by robinbowes

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