Monday, October 12, 2009

Re: [BLUG] PHP ereg() question

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 08:11:30PM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>
> Its weird though because I would have thought the opposite would be
> true based on the comments people make about Perl (that its old and
> obfuscated). In our opinion obviously PCRE are better, but that doesn't
> really make them more obvious. I would think that given that most unix
> utilities use POSIX RE and not PCRE, that POSIX would be more standard.

You've not used a modern version of GREP. The recent GNU GREP has
support for libpcre, providing Perl Compatible Regular Expressions.

Given that SED/AWK can be replaced by Perl directly, Grep is the big
tool using Posix regular expressions -- and by default it uses Standard
Regular Expressions.

You also have to take in to account that any tools not explicitly
targetting Posix Regex actually targets Perl Compatible Regex...

> As I stated to the developers when I made my first post on PHP-DEV
> though, this wasn't about which was better, it was only about giving the
> proper amount of time (or major releases) in between announcing that
> something is deprecated and removing it. The PHP core developers think
> 1 minor release is enough warning for a major core function.

This *is* PHP we're talking about. It has a big enough footprint in the
market that it doesn't matter what they do.

How many projects will be so annoyed by it that they'll move to another
language? Probably none. Instead the folks actually running the services
will have to support crappy obsolete versions of PHP for longer periods
of time. (Just as it was only recently that PHP 4 stopped being included
in many distros.)

--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07 78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

No comments: