Lisps in general are sort of famous for looking down on Regular Expressions. Other languages that lack Scheme's powerful pattern matching tend to fall back on regular expressions to provide some of that capability; one could argue that Regular Expressions have been badly overused. For example, any sort of pattern matching that involves stack-like matching (matching parentheses, quoted strings, etc.) is usually very difficult using regular expressions.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. -- Jamie Zawinski
Still, Regular Expressions are unbeatable for a lot of text processing tasks. MzScheme provides built in regular expressions using the Unix egrep syntax. The pregexp.ss library also provides "Perl-like" regular expressions, which makes avalilable pretty much all of the Perl regex syntax.
In the original Cookbook there was a stub for pattern matching of the type provided by match.ss Should this sort of pattern matching be discussed here or in the IdiomChapter page?
-- NoelWelsh - 19 May 2004
I think this page should be renamed StringPatternMatching? and the name PatternMatching? should
be used for the discussion of pattern matching on Scheme values with the help of match.ss and
plt-match.ss. A note refering to StringPatternMatching? and regular expressions would be a
good idea.
-- JensAxelSoegaard - 19 May 2004
I think renaming this page to RegularExpressions? might make sense, since most people would recognize that and understand the context.
-- AntonVanStraaten - 31 May 2004
ToDo: create RecipeStubs for unlinked recipes above
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