Regular expressions

[jupelius]

What should be the syntax of regular expressions in our language? Matching operators like ~= or a global regex object with suitable methods?

Also should we use an external library for regular expressions or implement them ourselves?

[RauliL]

Since we have our own Unicode string class, it would be difficult and ineffective use external libraries like PCRE to implement regular expressions.

I think the only option we have is to implement our own regular expression engine. It doesn't need to be comprehensive, just the basics.

[RauliL]

As for the syntax, it would be nice to have regular expression literals like in many other languages. This would require extra work with the parser but I think it's worth to try. Of course, regular expressions would have their own class Regexp and they could be compiled dynamically with a constructor which takes string as argument like this: Regexp("^[ \\t]+|[ \\t]+$")