Re: Suggestion for Enhancement; B, H, ... and D

Jacques followed up,

| As you  said « there  has been no  reason to escape a  d », I  wanted to
| point out  that the sequence "\d"  could exist in rcfiles,  and then the
| new syntax  will confuse the  *user*.

Then Bart was right.  OK, then, that's all the more reason that the
delimeters should not be characters that can appear at the start of a
variable's name.

| ... I  think that the embedded
| \D and \d syntax is rather  obfuscated and confusing ; as Bart said, the
| flag is `i' in other syntaxes... and is global for the regexp.

\D and \d are absolutely horrid as delimiters, I agree, and so are any other
backslashed alphabetic characters or digits.  So what is left that comes in
pairs?  Parentheses, square brackets, angle brackets, and slashes and
backslashes are already in use as specials (some if escaped, some if
unescaped); braces are reserved for a different future use; and
eighth-bit-high characters differ from one font to another.  The only thing
I can think of off the top of this splitting headache is double duty for
backslashed braces: if [after $-interpretation if applicable] there is
anything between \{ and \} that is neither a digit nor a comma, then they
mean "this part of the regexp must be matched with case-sensitivity."

And as with anything backslashed, if \{ comes at the start of the regexp,
the backslash needs to be protected with empty parentheses or another
backslash.


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