GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Dan Stromberg]

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 6:12 PM, geremy condra <debatem1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve at remove-this-cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> > On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:40:51 -0700, geremy condra wrote:
> >
> >> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Lie Ryan <lie.1296 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>> Nobody complains that python included a regular expression engine in
> >>> its standard distribution; so why complain that python included a Tcl
> >>> expression engine in its standard distribution.
> >>
> >> This is a silly argument.
> >>
> >> REs are not full programming languages, even from a theoretical point of
> >> view,
> >
> > True, but some theoretical extension to REs could be. If I've understood
> > correctly, Perl's regexes aren't actually regular expressions any more
> > (they're a superset) and might even be Turing Complete.
>
> I hereby theorize an extension to python that allows it to cook toast.
> Therefore, python is a toaster.
>

I don't agree with the argument that embedding tcl is just another extension
language.  See http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html

However, I feel I should point out that it is not a theoretical extension to
regex's that makes them not regex's anymore.  Theoretical regex's are pretty
much theoretical regexes - the things that're equivalent to NFA's.  But
_in_use_ implementations of regex's are _commonly_ more expressive than
theoretical regex's - in particular, the ability to memorize an arbitrarily
long substring and match it again later in the string goes beyond what an
NFA can do.
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