Ruby's regex

[Young Wah]

However, regular expression support is typically built into only
scripting languages,
such as Ruby, Perl, and awk. This is a shame: regular expressions,
although cryptic,
are a powerful tool for working with text. And having them built in,
rather than tacked
on through a library interface, makes a big difference.

The above statement is in the book "Programming Ruby" the second edition.
Why the author said "this is a shame"? I don't understand well. Thanks.

Regards.

 

[RichardOnRails]

However, regular expression support is typically built into only
scripting languages,
such as Ruby, Perl, and awk. This is a shame: regular expressions,
although cryptic,
are a powerful tool for working with text. And having them built in,
rather than tacked
on through a library interface, makes a big difference.

The above statement is in the book "Programming Ruby" the second edition.
Why the author said "this is a shame"? I don't understand well. Thanks.

Regards.

I see that language was carried along into the second edition. I take
the authors' bemoan the fact that you can't conveniently use regex's
in command-line expressions or C++ programs AFAIK, etc. Perhaps if
there were stand-alone regex packages, then possibly regex's could be
integrated into other packages.

On the other hand, the authors may have totally different things in
mind.

HTH,
Richard

 

[brabuhr]

However, regular expression support is typically built into only
scripting languages,
such as Ruby, Perl, and awk. This is a shame: regular expressions,
although cryptic,
are a powerful tool for working with text. And having them built in,
rather than tacked
on through a library interface, makes a big difference.

The above statement is in the book "Programming Ruby" the second edition.
Why the author said "this is a shame"? I don't understand well. Thanks.

I believe the author means that it would be wonderful if other
languages had built-in regular expressions too.

(it's a shame that other languages don't have built-in regex support
=> it would be wonderful if they did)