If nothing else, the ability to take an existing regex written by someone else years ago, dump it into the program and have it show it as a tree structure makes it staggeringly easier to debug.
I don't like GUIs / fluffy hand holding programs. I'm prepared to believe this is an irrational prejudice and actually this is a much easier way to deal with regex. Then again, if it isn't BBC BASIC I think it's too fluffy and modern ;-)
I started with a BBC B, back in 1983 (I think). Lovely piece of kit.
And I am _so_ not coding in anything other than a lovely IDE. And the thought of going back to actually remembering what method names are called fills me with horror.
Is there such a thing as a lovely IDE? I've yet to find one that doesn't fail on totally basic text editing UI or have a crapton of fiddly buttons with totally mysterious icons. In other words, they all look too much like KDE!
Visual Studio is lovely. Works fine for basic typing, while also allowing me to press a button and go direct to the source of a method call, debug things really nicely, underlining errors, completing variable names, and refactoring code nicely.
I have to freely admit that I really do like VS's debugging, and Intellisense is the best implementation of autocompleting that I've ever seen.
Having said that, it 'feels' wrong to me as an editor, and I almost always work in a language where intellisense would be exactly equivalent to the plain old symbol-name autocomplete that I have in EMACS.
Actually I guess that's not strictly true, I also work a lot in Perl and Python, but in Python I just use dir() in an interactive session and it tells me everything I need to know.
Visual Studio is lovely. I use NetBeans 7 right now, but because it's based on Java, it's dog slow in a way that slow dogs would be embarrassed to be associated with (while still being faster than Eclipse).
I've never found anything I really like for non .NET stuff - instead, I use an IDE until I get to the end of my tether with it, and move onto the next one. I can sort of see why people use vim, although that's always felt like seven shades of awful to me too.
If there was an IDE that just worked for my purposes, and did so well, I'd pay a thousand pounds for it, easily. Until then, a combination of things that don't quite work and Google gets me through.
I'd also say "Ergh", but because "[o]ur goal is to make Expresso the best .NET regular expression development tool on the planet" makes it rather pointless for me and their "it's free but we will nag you until you give us your email address" thing would a bit grumpy-making if I were going to install it.
(There's probably more than a little "in my day we wrote our regexps uphill in the snow both ways and we LIKED it", as well.)
Heh, any I write that are longer than a dozen characters or a bit hairy I explode like that. Because I know I'll need to understand them in 6 months' time.
Then add white space etc. to them yourself. Build a test suite with enough data extracted from the wild that you're confident that you're not breaking the regex, if it's complicated enough.
If you're having difficulty, the correct thing to do is to use a regexp species that is sufficiently expressive that it can incorporate whitespace, indentation, and if necessary multiline comments. Like Perl's been doing for the past fifteen years.
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If nothing else, the ability to take an existing regex written by someone else years ago, dump it into the program and have it show it as a tree structure makes it staggeringly easier to debug.
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And I am _so_ not coding in anything other than a lovely IDE. And the thought of going back to actually remembering what method names are called fills me with horror.
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I've tried Eclipse and NetBeans and they're both dire.
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Having said that, it 'feels' wrong to me as an editor, and I almost always work in a language where intellisense would be exactly equivalent to the plain old symbol-name autocomplete that I have in EMACS.
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I've never found anything I really like for non .NET stuff - instead, I use an IDE until I get to the end of my tether with it, and move onto the next one. I can sort of see why people use vim, although that's always felt like seven shades of awful to me too.
If there was an IDE that just worked for my purposes, and did so well, I'd pay a thousand pounds for it, easily. Until then, a combination of things that don't quite work and Google gets me through.
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(There's probably more than a little "in my day we wrote our regexps uphill in the snow both ways and we LIKED it", as well.)
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$regex = '@
\s+ # match some initial whitespace
( \w+ ) # capture the first word
@';
and so on.
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*insert rant about shoddy coders here*
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I'd be shocked if there wasn't something like that already: give it a V8 regexp, and it'll spit it out nicely formatted in /x format.
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