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Would you learn a language without regex support?

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 6:29 pm
by Luke
I am working in a scripting language called mivascript. It is unbelievably ugly and horrible. I don't even know how it got to the point it's at. Anyway, it doesn't have regex support at all. I don't understand how the script even caught on without regex support. That just doesn't seem right. Would you learn a language if you knew up front there was and never will be regex support?

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 7:04 pm
by RobertGonzalez
If you have to waste resource string manipulating things with functions that were not meant for that purpose, then you are not in the right environment. In my opinion.

Posted: Sat May 19, 2007 5:30 am
by Chris Corbyn
Is the language extensible? If you could write a library/extension for it pretty easily then you'd be able to tie it in with PCRE pretty easily :)

Posted: Sat May 19, 2007 7:10 am
by timvw
Actually, i don't know that many languages where regular expressions are part of the language itself... So, which languages do you use?

Posted: Sat May 19, 2007 8:07 am
by Chris Corbyn
Same here. Even in C/C++ you have to download libraries for it.

Posted: Sun May 20, 2007 10:11 am
by anjanesh
Strange that you're asking this question. I got a friend whos working for a company which services clients in Java apps alone and no one there seems to be into RegExp. They dont seem to need it all because they have all the API to extract what ever that need to. They're not into web-development but client-server apps (I think desktop based only).

I find that only ppl in web-development seem to require RegExp.

Posted: Sun May 20, 2007 10:46 am
by Jenk
There's a reason it's called PCRE.. Perl Compatible Regular Expression. I.e. nothing but Perl supports it natively :P even in PHP it is an optional extension.

Posted: Sun May 20, 2007 10:56 am
by feyd
Java has regex built-in too.

Posted: Sun May 20, 2007 11:48 am
by timvw
Afaik it's not really in the language itself.. It's in a standard api (java.util.regex)..

Posted: Sun May 20, 2007 1:02 pm
by Ambush Commander
JavaScript, I think, has native support for regexps. At the very least, they have a custom syntax for it.

Posted: Sun May 20, 2007 1:14 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Ambush Commander wrote:JavaScript, I think, has native support for regexps. At the very least, they have a custom syntax for it.
Languages with RegExp as a language feature (i.e. custom syntax) that I'm aware of.

Perl
JavaScript
Ruby

Posted: Mon May 21, 2007 4:31 pm
by feyd
timvw wrote:Afaik it's not really in the language itself.. It's in a standard api (java.util.regex)..
Except for the part that it's in String, which is apart of the language. ;)

Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 12:32 am
by timvw
Well, in earlier versions there was no such support ;)

(But since it seems to be there from 1.4, which was released in 2002, i would say that i'm talking about ancient history ;))