[wplug] OT: Emacs, regular expressions and syntax highlighting

[Vance Kochenderfer]

"Terence J. Golightly" <terencejgolightly at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are regular expressions standardized at all between applications?  Bash, 
> Sed, Awk, Emacs, Vi/Vim etc, etc.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to
choose from.  Within POSIX itself, you have basic regular
expressions (used by sed and grep) and extended regular
expressions (used by awk and egrep).
<http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/basedefs/xbd_chap09.html>

Perl has probably set the bar for more modern regular expressions,
adding a number of features.  These are available to a number of
applications and programming languages via the PCRE library.

A decent introduction to regular expressions can be found at
<http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html>, and a catalog
of different implementations of regular expressions is at
<http://www.regular-expressions.info/tools.html>.

Vance Kochenderfer        |  "Get me out of these ropes and into a
vkochend at nyx.net          |   good belt of Scotch"    -Nick Danger