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Perl: Regular Expressions
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Without regular expressions, Perl would be a fast development environment. Probably a little faster than VB for console apps. With the addition of regular expressions, Perl exceeds other RAD environments five to twenty-fold in the hands of an experienced practitioner, on console apps whose problem domains include parsing (and that's a heck of a lot of them).
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Perl syntax reflects the idea that "things that are different should look different". For example, scalars, arrays, and hashes have different leading sigils. Array indices and hash keys use different kinds of braces. Strings and regular expressions have different standard delimiters. This approach can be contrasted with languages like Lisp, where the same S-expression construct and basic syntax is used for many different purposes.
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PowerGREP's regular expression engine is fully compatible with popular regex flavors such as those used by Perl, Java and the .NET framework. PowerGREP ... supports all the Perl 5 extensions, such as non-greedy operators and zero-width assertions. PowerGREP also supports the Java extensions (possessive quantifiers) to Perl's flavor, as well as the .NET framework's extensions (named capturing groups).
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On December 18, 2007, the 20th anniversary of Perl 1.0, Perl 5.10.0 was released. Perl 5.10.0 includes notable new features, which bring it closer to Perl 6, among them a new switch statement (called "given/when"), regular expressions updates, the "smart match operator" ~~, and more.[6]
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It is now possible to write much more readable Perl code (even within regular expressions). Formerly cryptic variable names can be replaced by mnemonic identifiers. Error messages are more informative, and the optional warnings will catch many of the mistakes a novice might make. This cannot be stressed enough. Whenever you get mysterious behavior, try the -w switch!!! Whenever you don't get mysterious behavior, try using -w anyway.
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Regular Expressions