On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 03:34:33PM +0100, Jon Fairbairn <Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote a message of 37 lines which said:
Because the language used inside these strings is standard, multi-language, widely used and documented?
10,000 lemmings can't be wrong?
Right, disregard ASCII and specify the lexemes of Haskell 2 in a new encoding scheme, much better than ASCII :-)
Not even the syntax of such regexps is checked at compile time.
Of course, from the compiler's PoV, they are just strings. May be a new form of strings, like in Perl, to show that this is a regexp?
Since Unicode is increasingly adopted, we could just use «regexp»
The Unicode standard for regexps, UTR #18 (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18/) uses the very same standard syntax that you criticize.