From: Gary Coady (gary at domain netsoc.tcd.ie)
Date: Tue 11 Jun 2002 - 01:40:43 IST
On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 11:13:18PM +0100, David Golden wrote:
> It is good, so is "Mastering Regular Expressions" - which is probably
> better, in fact, and covers a lot of the same ground, but deals with
> regular expressions in other software too. Such as the frankly terrifying
> (but cool) ones in perl.
I think you're pretty spot on here. One of the major things that I found
out from the above book was the absolutely massive difference between
the Perl regexp engine and the POSIX engine - so much so that a similar
regexp could take an extremely long time (and exponentially increasing
with length) with the POSIX regexp engine but which would finish immediately
with the Perl regexp engine. That's something I never read anywhere else,
and I actually got to employ it once when a regexp was taking forever to
run on a PHP page, but changing it to a pcre expression meant it would work
almost instantly.
> Buy both if you can find them among the 1000s of Java and .NET
> books that are clogging up the shelves these days (And god help you if
> you're actually looking for a computer science book rather than a "how to
> waste 6 months programming something in Java/C# that would take a day in
> Lisp or even [incr tcl], for pity's sake..." book)
I must learn Lisp some day... I'm afraid my only claim to "alternate
language" fame is a short project in Erlang implementing the sliding
window protocol. Which was fun as functional languages go, and make me
quite determined to try Haskell one of these days...
Gary.
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