[developers] TDL syntax extension for regular expressions

[Francis Bond]

G'day,

>> Do we gain anything by having separate symbols for start and end?  I
>> would have thought ^regexp^ can do the job just as well, without taking
>> up another precious character :-).
>
> We are only restricting the possible uses of ^: sequences starting with ^ have
> to terminate with $. This doesn't prevent you from introducing some other
> language element that uses $. Templates are still parsed, for instance.
>
> The advantage of that syntax are that a) it raises the right intuitions that
> this thing is indeed a regex, b) it makes the anchoring explicit, and c) we need
> no extra character escaping convention beyond the perl regex conventions.

Fair enough.  Thanks for the explanation.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a brief explanation of the TDL syntax
on the wiki (hint, hint).


-- 
Francis Bond <http://www2.nict.go.jp/x/x161/en/member/bond/>
NICT Language Infrastructure Group