From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <7359f0490906271220q4773f616k7d1a6ec79a3a30bc@mail.gmail.com> References: <138575260906260250hca23acbi34aed21566004bad@mail.gmail.com> <3aaafc130906271117h333de206xd746efe8474e6f35@mail.gmail.com> <7359f0490906271220q4773f616k7d1a6ec79a3a30bc@mail.gmail.com> Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:32:38 -0400 Message-ID: <3aaafc130906271332m19450329h67b1e965329917b@mail.gmail.com> From: "J.R. Mauro" To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Re: [9fans] Sam commands in acme Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0fd120d0-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Rob Pike wrote: > > Indeed, but it's an excellent reason to remove a bad feature. =A0@ was a > bad feature. It was hard to use well because @* or @+ would consume > the whole file. Your structural regex paper gripes about . and * not consuming newlines. Apparently it didn't work in practice as you say, but have you thought about a different way that might work since? Changing the delimiter based on context would seem like a good, though heavyweight and probably harder-to-understand approach. > > Deletion is the greatest tool of software design. > Quite, though this one in particular seems much less out of place in sam compared to * despite its glaring faults.