# From: Olin Shivers <shivers@clark.lcs.mit.edu>
# Date: Fri, 2 Dec 94 14:23:15 -0500
#
# I got you covered here. I designed and wrote the field-reader routines
# last night when I should have been studying for a Mandarin midterm.
# I didn't do a record parser that splits things based on regexps; I
# specify field delimiters as sets of characters. Do you think the
# extra power of regexps would be useful? It's an interesting idea, but
# I can't think of any cases where I would want it off the top of my head.
# I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this.
After perusing your interface I was unable to come up with a situation
where I've used regular expressions as delimiters that I couldn't have
used a character set in combination with your F-ELIDE? flag. On the
other hand, I think it is important to provide support for regular
expression delimiters because:
1) Regular expressions are more general than character sets,
and someone will find a situation in which only they will do
soon enough, and
2) Popular scripting languages like Perl and Python already
provide this feature, and people (at least people I work with)
have become accustomed to it.
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