impulse9 wrote:
Disallowing these would do more bad than good. Buggy regular expressions are quite easy to write, even without '|)'
True!
Using |) is quite intuitive. We have a lot of cases than some symbol(s) may or may not be present, and this is a natural way to say that. Moreover it makes regular expressions more flexible.
This is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
[QUOTE] Regular expressions are particularly useful in the production of code completion systems and syntax highlighting in integrated development environments (IDEs).
For example: (public|private|protected|)\s*(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s*\(
as used to match type declarations in source code (see also, Regular expression examples ). [/QUOTE]
Alternatives are just alternatives. Or should we assume that boost::regex is only Perl6+ compatible?
It's a trivial change to make, but let me think this through... John.