[Caml-list] ocamllex, regular expression syntax

[Stefan Heimann <lists@stefanheimann.net>]

Hi,

[sorry if this posting appears twice. I first submitted it with my
news client. It seems not to appear on the mailing list and so I
decided to post it again]


I new to ocaml and today I played a little bit around with
ocamllex. Now I'm wondering why ocamllex has this strange regular
expression syntax. One has to quoted every character, an arbitrary
character is matched by the underscore...

The manual for ocamllex says: "The regular expressions are in the
style of lex, with a more Caml-like syntax."

But the regular expression syntax in the Str module looks "normal" to
me.

Regular expressions like this

"[^"\\]*(\\.[^"\\]*)*"

are not easy to read, but with the ocamllex syntax it is even more
difficult:

'"'[^'"''\\']*('\\'_[^'"''\\']*)*'"'

(and harder to write).

Is this just for historical reason or is there a practical reason for
this syntax? I'm just curious...



Bye,
  Stefan

-- 
Stefan Heimann
http://www.stefanheimann.net :: personal website.
http://cvsshell.sf.net       :: CvsShell, a console based cvs client.

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