G'day, <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> jointly with peter and dan, we are nearing completion on a first public release of the new `chart mapping' machinery (see Adolphs et al., 2008, at LREC).  in this context, we would like to add a syntax extension for regular expressions to TDL.  we were tempted to use /[a-z]+/, much like in awk, perl, et al.  but the slash is already in use for defaults (in the LKB). our current proposal is ^[a-z]+$, i.e. delimit regular expressions with an opening cap and a closing dollar sign.  the rationale, here, is that we assume regular expressions to be implicitly anchored anyway (hence, to match a sub-string, a pattern will have to be padded: ^.*[a-z]+.*$).</blockquote><div> 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 :-).  </div></div> -- Francis Bond <<a href="http://www2.nict.go.jp/x/x161/en/member/bond/">http://www2.nict.go.jp/x/x161/en/member/bond/</a>> NICT Language Infrastructure Group