Hacker News Reader

The readability should be compared to alternative ways to solve the same problem. Sure, regexes are not the most intuitive syntax, but it is compact and declarative. What is the alternative? Substring searches? Looping over characters? Hand-rolled recursive descent? Neither are obviously more readable, and intermingles the pattern with the mechanism.

View on HN

Raku worked on this. As the Perl successor, they gave regex a lot of attention. The result still look like regex, but more powerful and with a more consistent syntax. They also made "/x" the default, which ignores unescaped whitespace and lets you put comments, so you can use spacing and indentation for readability. The general idea is that they are treated like actual programs rather than extended search strings.

But Raku, despite some good ideas and what looks like a nice community is not mainstream to say the least. So I don't expect "RCRE" to become a thing anytime soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com