POSIX Regular Expression Funnyness

[Ken Arnold]

In article <8843 at alice.UUCP> andrew at alice.UUCP (Andrew Hume) writes:
>the new ctype style goo in regular expressions only applies inside
>[] expressions in order to ease compatability problems.

Andrew, Puh-lease!  In my article I stated why I didn't think this is
a problem, and asked what I'd missed.  What, pray tell, is *worse*
about the compatibility problems with "[:alpha:]" than with "[[:alpha:]]"?
Note that the second expression is also currently legal, although (I
suspect), just as unlikely to appear in practice as the first.

>the thing that pisses me off is that they want to make \c where c is
>a regular (non-special) character exactly equivalent to c, ...

Yeah, I agree with you on that.  This makes little sense.

		Ken Arnold