Lol - it's not about making me happy - it's about making sure the changes we make (as a whole) are as good as they can be. Designing syntax is not an easy task (particularly when it's English-like) and It's good to discuss these things so you don't end up missing something that could end up being more succinct.Lol.. Jan.. just do what I do. Pick one of:
- Implement it, send the pull request, do whatever runrevmark wants to make him happy with it then tell people it's done.
- Post here to discuss the idea, do whatever runrevmark wants to make him happy, implement it, send the pull request.
I really don't really see these long discussions as 'bikeshedding' (although I did find the reference amusing) - as @mwieder points out once you decide on syntax its hard to change in the future (unless you want a lot of people complaining about their scripts breaking
). Also, by discussing the different ways of expressing things, we might end up finding other abstractions unrelated to this particular feature that would work elsewhere.In any case, I like the last proposed syntax - it's consistent with the old-style format, and establishes the syntax [ {wildcard | regex} [ pattern ] ] as a new concept in the language - i.e. a string that is interpreted as a pattern. The latter aspect can be iterated to both 'replace' and to a 'matches' operator in time
As an aside: I do wonder how much discussion goes on in standardization committees about more established languages such as C/C++ - given the length of time between standards, I think we are doing quite well
