Re: syntax rant (was Re: bug: overoptimizing RE)

    Vikas Agnihotri <VikasA(_at_)att(_dot_)com> writes...

> Err.. Just out of academic curiosity, can anyone elaborate exactly how
> procmail differs from the "common subset of features" found in most RE
> engines out there.
    If somebody wanted to do this, a good place to start would be with
    Jeffrey Friedl's book "Mastering Regular Expressions" (O'Reilly &
    Associates, Inc, ISBN 1-56592-257-3).  In Chapter 6, "Tool-Specific
    Information" he has a table called "A Superficial Survey of a Few
    Common Programs' Flavor" in which he compares 17 different RE features
    of:

        Traditional grep
        vi
        Modern grep
        Modern sed
        egrep
        lex
        Traditional awk
        GNU Emacs
        Perl
        Tcl
        Python (default)
        Expect

    As you can imagine there is already a fair amount of differences
    between these various programs.  It'd be interesting to see how
    divergent ProcMail is in comparison.

                                                                Later...BC