Hi!
On Dec 28, 2007 5:51 PM, Lihn, Steve
Since regex is involved, it is specific to (Byte)String, not a generic list.
Oh, this gives me an interesting idea: making regular expressions more generic. Would not it be interesting and useful (but not really efficient) to have patterns something like: foo :: Eq a => a -> ... foo (_{4}'b') = ... which would match a list with four elements ending with an element 'b'. Or: foo (_+';'_+';'_) = ... which would match a list with embedded two ';' elements. (Last _ matched the remaining of the list.) OK, maybe guards are not the proper place to implement this as would add a possibility to make a really messy Haskell programs. But extending regular expressions to work on any list of elements with type implementing Eq would be realy powerfull. And then we could use split in many other than just text processing contexts. Of course, the problem in both cases is implementing something like regular expressions efficiently, especially on lists, but this is why there are smart people around. :-) Mitar