I might review these some day. In the meantime, the question
often arises, "Which is best?" The short answer: they all are.
Every one of these has advantages in one situation or another ...
The name of a mostly-monthly column on
scripting languages and
effective programming
written since 1998 mostly by Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz.
The column does not focus exclusively on REs, although
there's usually one installment devoted to the topic every
second year or so. Why the name, then? It seemed like a
good idea at the time: we publish periodically or regularly,
we think a lot about the expressiveness of different
computing languages, and most of the languages we cover happen
to employ REs prominently.
The column originally began as "Regular Expressions" [tell the story
of the name selection] for
SunWorld Online beginning in mid-1998.
SunWorld Online, arguably the first professional
Web magazine, folded into UnixInsider in mid-2000.
UnixInsider changed its business model several times,
most dramatically in early 2001, and last ran an installment of
the column in March 2001.
ITworld.com picked up three final installments in April and May 2001.
We took a
vacation from "Regular Expressions" for the summer, then relaunched
the column
in August 2001 for
UnixReview.com.
UnixReview changed its business model in mid-2007, and
we took a sabbatical until
Linux
Developer Network began to host
"RE" at the end of summer 2008.
UnixReview.com did a good job
indexing the RE columns it has published.
SunWorld Online
maintained--somewhat erratically--a minimal
index
to the twice-a-month column. Or maybe it doesn't; the
previous URL seems to have gone badly stale, and
this
isn't much of a substitute. In any case,
Jean-Claude Wippler
agitated for a more extensively annotated table of contents
to the column [IMPORTANT! As of April 2001, several of these
hyperlinks have gone bad. I'm aware of it, and doggedly working to
restore them.
Write me
if there's one in particular you need]:
February 2007: "Tcl
Scores High in RE Performance" is another debunking attempt; this
one illustrates several of the mistaken beliefs circulating
around regular expressions;
January 2007: "Sprints" also touches on data quality;
March 2006: "Experience Teaches Lessons for Team Projects"
emphasizes that "real-world" projects need logging, introspection,
and configurability more than your project partners will realize;
August 2002: "Yes You Can"
is about technologies that can improve your presentations;
July 2002: "Economy of Means" focuses attention on software engineer
Richard Suchenwirth, the Tcl-ers Wiki, and what they can teach
about "light-weight programming";
March 2001: "More than just English", about starting to
use alphabets other than the Latin one, with Unicode;
mid-February 2001: "Pulling different threads", which
illustrates the point that languages differ in esoteric
capabilities with an examination of threading models and
implementation in Perl, Python, and Tcl;
mid-December 2000: "Scripted wrappers for legacy applications"
is about controlling existing command-line applications
written in C, Fortran, Java, ... with Perl, Python, Tcl, ...;
December 2000: "Better living through scripting" praises
David Roth's book on the use of Perl for Win32 system
administrators, and salutes SourceForge's takeover of
open-source culture;
mid November 2000: "Scripting systems unite"
provides more details on Scheme, and especially on
Java-scripting Schemes;
mid-September 2000: "Scripting Qt"
describes how Perl, Python, and Tcl connect to Qt. Also,
Piper is GNU's answer to .NET;
September 2000: "Tk footnotes" waves hands in the
direction of what makes Tk programming special.
SWANK is among the names it drops;
mid-August 2000: "Scripting with C"
compares the benefits of CINT, EiC, ElastiC, ICI, LPC, and Pike;
August 2000: ".NET is real"
presents Dick Hardt's observations that lead to the
conclusion Microsoft's .NET initiative has real content;
mid-July 2000: "Option
database options", sometimes titled, "Options for the Tk option
database", the third installment of the series
with Allen Flick. We also enumerate several of the virtues
of M&M's
Effective Tcl/Tk Programming book;
early July 2000: "Successful
evaluations", on scripting's code-data duality and the
use of eval (however spelled). Digita Script
makes a brief appearance;
mid-December 1999, "Python
reaches for stardom": Python news, including Job Board,
Python Consortium, and one of the first technically-grounded
profiles of e-speak. Also, Tk for all languages,
XRexx, Tcl pre-processing, and monoids. Missing item:
more Tk pointers;
November 1999, "Programming
events": language-neutral tutorial on event-based multitasking;
mid-October 1999, "Let
the REBOLlion Begin", on the REBOL language. There's
also brief mention of XML-RPC, scripting for Apache,
and several indications that
The Enterprise is taking scripting a bit more seriously;
August 1999, "Cinderella languages":
Tom Poindexter tells about the early days of using
Perl, Tcl and other languages with DBMSs including
Sybase and Oracle. Also, a brief profile of CPU's
IntelliPlant;
mid-July 1999, "It's
a good time to be a polyglot": getting different
scripting languages to play together nicely.
This installment
mentions such technologies for cross-language development as
SWIG, Lua, XML-RPC, message-passing, TclKit, REBOL, and many
more;
April 1999, "Scripting
with C": Canon's OpenPage is one of several industrial
products which employs Tim Long's ICI. Also, an explanation
of our aims for "Regular Expressions";
December 1998, "Batteries
Included", on the previous month's
Python Conference, significantly propagated the meme that
constitutes its title;
November 1998, "What's
going on with Guile?" presents GNU's Scheme dialect. Also,
one paragraph on the New South Wales Wholesale State Electricity
Market (SEM);
mid-October 1998, "Catching up with JavaScript and Python"
October 1998, "The
safety of scripting", on whether scripting languages are safe
for serious use;
September 1998, "Plenty of headroom left for Perl";
mid-August 1998, "Report from Pythonia" was published just under five weeks after release of 1.0 of JPython;
Cameron
Laird's personal notes on "Regular
Expressions"/claird@phaseit.net