Article:		Top Ten Data Crunching Tips and Tricks
Subject:		non-greedy regular expressions is the common term
Date:		2005-06-09 21:51:35
From:		wixton
not reluctant, or generous. regular expressions were popularized most by perl, and in that community and others) the terminology is non-greedy regular expressions. a search shows it's mostly java heads who are using this alternate terminology.

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• non-greedy regular expressions is the common term
  2005-06-22 05:52:42  GregWilson [View]
  
  
  Yes, but (a) there are more Java heads out there than Perl heads (even today), and (b) I believe the term "reluctant" pre-dates the first version of Perl by about twenty years. And let's face it --- if I used the term "non-greedy", some Java head would have complained (and some Lisp programmer would have pointed out that "non-greedy" is ambiguous, since there are N different ways to define pattern matching that aren't strictly greedy, all of which are implemented by the following set of mutually-recursive functions...)