[lug] XEmacs quoting madness!

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Tkil" == Tkil  <tkil at scrye.com> writes:

Tkil>   (while (re-search-forward "Can\\\\'t" (point-max) t)
Tkil>      ...)

Tkil> just as an aside, this is a place where you really start
Tkil> noticing the tradeoffs between regular, consistent,
Tkil> easy-to-parse languages (like lisp, python, tcl) and nasty,
Tkil> irregular, special-case-all-over-the- place languages (like
Tkil> perl).

I'm no fan of perl syntax!  But regular expressions are one place that
Perl made some nicer decisions than Emacs did.

For instance in Perl you simply use `(.|.)' to do submatches with
alternation.  In Emacs you must use `\(.\|.\)' -- thus requiring extra
quoting for the backslashes.  Worse, Emacs functions like
query-replace-regexp expose this to the user.

Tom