🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <10210@cbmvax.commodore.com> daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) writes:

   Well, TriPos, basically.  But the logic behind it is that, rather than
   simple wildcards, you have a reasonable regular expression language.
   The "*" convention would be a waste of a metacharacter.  The one that's
   missing (but hopefully in 1.4) is a negation character.

This brings up a point that has always annoyed me about Unix. It's got
regular expression languages all over the place - ed, vi, sed, grep,
awk, and others. They _all_ use the same basic languages, and many
Eunices even have a library to provide these facilities, so that you
get the same language everywhere.

Except for file name globbing. There, "*" changes from meaning "zero
or more of the previous pattern" to "zero or more of '?'", and the "."
character becomes "?". This always seemed like a violation of the rule
of least surprise.

This should go on my 1.4 (1.5? 2.0?) wish list - that all standard
commands that might want to deal with patterns accept the same regular
expression language, and that filename wildcarding match that. It'd
also be nice if the '#' operator moved to behind the expression where
it belongs, but that's a minor nit.

	<mike



--
Teddies good friend has his two o'clock feast		Mike Meyer
And he's making Teddies ex girl friend come		mwm@relay.pa.dec.com
They mistook Teddies good trust				decwrl!mwm
Just for proof that Teddy was dumb.