In article g82@cd4680fs.rrze.uni-erlangen.de, mskuhn@cip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn) writes:
>>>>>>> On 24 May 1995 22:45:29 GMT, Kalyan Kolachala
>><kal@chromatic.com> said:
>
>>    Kalyan> I personally consider regular expressions to be very
>>    Kalyan> useful.  Those from the Unix world will tell you how
>>    Kalyan> frequently you need them and come across them. In most
>>    Kalyan> cases one ends up using Perl, sed etc As it is I have seen
>>    Kalyan> a widespread use of the Regular expressions from various
>>    Kalyan> class libraries but the code using them suffers from
>>    Kalyan> portability problems.
>
>A regexp library has already been standardized in the Posix standard
>long ago (IEEE 1003.2). Just use this standard if you need a formal
>standard that specifies regular expressions. Most good C++ programming
>environments also conform to Posix. Were is the problem?

Well, in a perfect world, one would *like* a regular expression library
that exploits the superior expressive power of C++.  The POSIX regular
expression standard assumes C, of course.  In fact, there is a whole
INDUSTRY in building a C++ interface over the POSIX standard, just waiting
to be exploited.  (I'm not kidding.)

Nonetheless, I respect and support the Committee's decision *not* to
include regular expression parsing capability in the C++ standard.  As
it is, I feel the Committee took a bit too long and standardized a bit
too much.  Sometimes, less is more.  If you admit regular expression
parsing into the mix, why stop there?  Why not 3-D graphics?  Why not
language parsing?....


---
Marc Shepherd
Salomon Brothers Inc
shepherd@schubert.sbi.com The opinions I express are no one's but mine!