On Jul  4, 1999, Alexandre Oliva <oliva@dcc.unicamp.br> wrote:

> On Jul  4, 1999, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
>> Alexandre Oliva <oliva@dcc.unicamp.br> writes:
>>> So, even though `.*' appears to be much more intuitive, it is not
>>> really that intuitive if you don't happen to know what's going on
>>> behind the scenes, so I'd rather have a prefix that is clearly not
>>> part of the regexp.  It might have been better to use a (cons 'partial
>>> "regex") to denote partial matches...

>> Yes, that sounds like a better idea than a "magic" prefix.

> OTOH, it might break existing code that relies on the existing format.
> In this sense, `.*' would be better.  Even if we have to special-case
> it in the splitting engine and in the docs, it would be backward
> compatible.

It seems to me that the attached patch is fully backward-compatible,
and its outcome is not surprising, not even in terms of \N
substitutions.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva IC-Unicamp, Bra[sz]il
{oliva,Alexandre.Oliva}@dcc.unicamp.br  aoliva@{acm.org,computer.org}
oliva@{gnu.org,kaffe.org,{egcs,sourceware}.cygnus.com,samba.org}
*** E-mail about software projects will be forwarded to mailing lists