lexer changes

[Matthias Andree]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, Boris 'pi' Piwinger wrote:

> Exactly. It is even worse, since different dialects of
> regular expression have different rules. In some you need +
> as a quantifier, in some \+, same for ? or \?. So if I see a
> \ I alway need to verify if this is doing something here and
> if so what. So any superfluous \ let's me believe it is
> needed, so I don't understand what's going on. There were so
> many expressions I did not understand (there are stille
> many), so that I had to work a long time to read them. In
> some cases I found that they would not make sense (would
> never match), in some cases I found that they were just
> irritating, in some cases they were required. Obfuscation.

The difference between basic and extended regular expressions (grep vs.
egrep vs. sed vs. ...) is indeed making quick perception more difficult.

However, we don't switch between various regexp packages, but use flex,
feel free to comment the code to list what \ does with respect to the
usual suspect characters (*, +, (), [], ...).

-- 
Matthias Andree

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