To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
IMHO "SQL-like" syntax would be MUCH MORE usefull for regular expressions. Existing syntax is...crap. It's just like some kind of weird cipher, very hard to use and understand.
If you mean by "SQL-like" the syntax SQL uses for the LIKE clause, that's exactly the same pattern matching syntax that 'wildcards' use, except with '?' replaced by '_' and '*' replaced by '%'.
As far as I know, SQL doesn't have regex matching, although, apparently, most SQL implementations have one non standard form or another. MySQL uses unix regexp syntax, for instance: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/pattern-matching.html
while regular expression syntax can be hard to read, it's actually pretty good for what it does, and no one has ever come up with a better syntax for regular-expression based pattern matching.





Member since:
2005-07-22
IMHO "SQL-like" syntax would be MUCH MORE usefull for regular expressions. Existing syntax is...crap. It's just like some kind of weird cipher, very hard to use and understand.