Re: What's the name of this library? (was: Re: autotools transition report: v 28.07)

[Phil Edwards <phil at jaj dot com>]

On Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 09:18:52AM +0200, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> Phil Edwards <phil@jaj.com> writes:
> | 
> | "+" is not part of any natural language alphabet.
> 
> Do you have any reference for that assertion?

No.  Natural languages are merely a hobby of mine, not a profession, but
I've never come across a written language which includes '+'.  Do you
have any counterexamples?


> | So when a regex is built
> | that looks for <word><not-a-word><word>, the "++" ends up in the wrong part
> | of the match.
> 
> That simply means you have the wrong definition of "word".

Gaby, it's not me.  It's grep, and sed, and awk, and perl, and every other
formal definition of regular expressions I've ever seen.  None of them
include '+' as part of their "member of a word" regexp (recently spelled
'\w', more commonly recognized as '[A-Za-z]', occasionally with digits).
Things that look for words will not find "++".  It's not a hypothetical
proposal, it's something that rears its head and bites us every now
and again.

I would say, "search the overseers mail archives for examples concerning
libstdc++," but none of the gcc.gnu.org archives can be searched for
"++".  Why?  Because '+' isn't part of a word, and therefore "++" never
gets indexed in the search databases.


Phil

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