On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 07:14:43AM -0700,
ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:
Um, no. For the very small subset of users sophisticated enough to
write this sort of code themselves, I believe their expectation will
be set by past experience with other matching systems, and these
systems tend to default to greedy matching.
I think even in that sophisticated subset, most people just live
their pattern-matching lives without really thinking about the
difference.
But admittedly, my own expectations are muddy, and, worse,
seem to change with the lexical structure of the pattern.
Speaking naively -- I know that this isn't how things work
or should work --
* If the end of my pattern is part of a grammatical whole, I want
the wildcard to be greedy; certainly, I, too, would expect
"f*o" to fully match "foo", not to stop after the first "o".
* But if the end of my pattern is a delimiter, I tend to implicitly
expect the expression be defined as something that doesn't
contain that delimiter, as in the example Kjetil quoted where few
people would expect the * before a closing > in an e-mail address
to itself contain another >.
I think what this all says is that what felt to me like a problem
with greed is really a problem with globbing and insufficient
expressiveness of * (regexps have problems, too, once you get
to comments and quoting, but one has to work a little harder to
make things fail.)
So let's stay greedy; thanks for setting me straight!
No problem ;-) And let's also remember that a necessary corollary here
is that the regexp we end up choosing needs to support both greedy and
non-greedy matching.
Ned