Syntax synomyms

[francislavoie]

Already suggested from Reddit:

exactly as synonym to literally

either as synonym to either of

[KarimGeiger]

Thank you.

Someone suggested any of instead of/as a synonym for either of. What do you think about that?

[francislavoie]

I agree

[zookatron]

I think it's actually really important to support any of as an alternative to either of. The more I use it the more confusing and flow-breaking it is to use either of. The phrase any of is much easier to understand and slightly easier to write.

[hoshsadiq]

Wouldn't literal be better than exactly or literally? I find it easier to read as:

capture literal "@"

[KarimGeiger]

literal would be way better, yes. In fact, exactly is already in use as a quantifier.

[llagerlof]

"literal" could be a synonym to "exactly".

In fact, I prefer "exactly".

[KarimGeiger]

@llagerlof but what about the quantifier? What if you want to match something exactly 3 times? I think using exactly for both characters and quantifiers would be insane...

[llagerlof]

I said "exactly"? Sorry, I meant to say "literally".

[francislavoie]

How do you feel about breaking language changes? Like replacing either of entirely with any of? Just wondering how much backwards compatibility matters at this stage.

[KarimGeiger]

I'll try to avoid it as much as possible. If there will be any breaking changes, I'm going to deprecate the old syntax first, before removing it completely in a later release.

[KarimGeiger]

Just a quick thought.. maybe it even makes sense to remove the literally keyword completely and just assume you're expecting the literal text if there's a "lost" string in quotes. I don't know if this would break something, though:

literally "foo" once or more

would become

"foo" once or more

[codyfletcher]

@KarimGeiger might be on to something! I think it's important for SRL to have an explicit word, but having it optional is great!

[thinkhuman]

In my eagerness I entered a similar issue.
Strong +1 to changing "either" to "any", but I propose changing "literally" to "match" ("Match '@' ", not "Literally '@' ")

[SamTebbs33]

@thinkhuman Could usage of "match" be confusing as many languages use a match function to find capture groups? Just a thought!

[ghost]

What about non-character instead no character and non-whitespace instead of no whitespace?

[thinkhuman]

@SamTebbs33 fair point, though finding language-agnostic words might prove difficult.

Maybe "Matching"? As in

begin with any of (number, letter, one of "._%+-") once or more,
matching "@",
letter at least 2 times,
must end, case insensitive

[ghost]

@thinkhuman I don't think that's a good idea. It can really be confusing.

for example => matching ".{2}"

ab matching with .{2} but there is no doubt about what literally ".{2}" means.

[Saluev]

By the way, why one of and any of are two different keywords? Why don't use them interchangeably?

[ghost]

I think this would be confusing.

[llagerlof]

I think we are leaving the purpose of this tool. "literally" is, literally, the best english word to write when you meant to write literally "something".

[Saluev]

@nsgonultas But they are doing semantically the same thing.

[ghost]

Yes, they are semantically similar, but:
regex equivalent of one of(i.e. [...]) only accepts characters and character classes,
regex equivalent of any of(i.e. (?:...|...|...) can accept more complicated things.
In my opinion, using them interchangeably will confuse beginners.

[hoshsadiq]

There's too much being discussed here, it's hard to keep track of what's going on. Does it make sense to separate these out? And potentially moving this to the simpleregex/language repo?