the regex engine is indeed a monster. The amount of work being put into it in bleadperl should be a good indicator of that.

I agree with the first point. I'm not so sure about the second point. Its hard to calculate how much of my dev time has been related to the complexity and opacity of the engine and how much has been other things. I just dont see a necessary relationship between monstrosity and the time spent on development. I wonder what dave_the_m would say.

I kinda wonder at how any industrial strength regular expression engine could be anything but a monster. A programs structure comes to reflect its problem domain I think, and when the domain is complex, the code will be too. And I think that the problem domain of search and replace with perl style not-so-regular regular expressions is quite complex. Ive looked at the sources for the latest TCL engine, and PCRE and they are all large comprehensive bodies of code. Ill grant that Perls is not the cleanest implementation, nor the best documented but IMO all of those packages are monsters.

I guess it all comes down to what you consider monster code to be.

---
$world=~s/war/peace/g

In reply to How could it not be a monster? by demerphq
in thread Things you should need to know before using Perl regexes. (Humour, with a serious point) by BrowserUk

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