[lextypes] A precis of my comments to Jeni on DTL and her reply

[John Cowan]

(I'm not posting the originals because they contain personal material
as well.)

1) I expressed my view that XML-style regexes are just too much of a
notation change (too verbose, too unfamiliar) from classical string
regexes for too little gain (despite being the one who spec'd them for
RNG 2.x, based on Olin Shivers's Scheme regex library).  References to
named sub-regexes could be achieved with Perlish ${foo} syntax or
something novel like \R{foo}.  Jeni said that the advantage of the
XML-style regexes was the ability to annotate them with attributes,
especially the locally-scoped named subgroups -- she didn't see how to
do those with string regexes.

2) I suggested adding "remove" as a new type of whitespace normalization,
adducing the French use of spaces in long numbers.  Jeni pointed out how
this could be done within a regex; I agree, but continue to think that
whitespace is just irrelevant in most non-string datatypes, and how it
would be useful to make it easy to strip it completely.

3) I added my concerns to Bob Foster's about arbitrary XSLT in DTL.
She agreed.

-- 
First known example of political correctness:   John Cowan
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Jurchen tribes under the leadership of the      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Manchus, his successor Abahai (1592-1643)       jcowan at reutershealth.com
issued an order that the name Jurchen should       --S. Robert Ramsey,
be banned, and from then on, they were all         _The Languages of China_
to be called Manchus."