Re: Extending REG-EXP to 2-Dimension.

Although I've often wished for this facility, I've never actually bothered
to think about what it involves before, so if I sound naive, that's my
excuse. :-)


It seems to me that the first problem is "what would a user expect this
to do?" The suggested "circles of text" seems fairly useless from a user's
perspective. I'd expect a user to be looking for something like one of:


- a single regexp that matches in one or more lines, i.e. there is one
    match of the regexp for each line.
- a sequence of regexps, that can be matched to lines. The nth regexp
    matches the nth line.
- a single regexp that matches the block of text, if that block of text
    is first transformed into a "single" line (whether you treat newlines
    a significant is optional here, I guess).


You can then further refine the semantics - in the first option, should
should all matches be the same as the first, or should any match do?


Once you've got a definition that the user could work with, *then* it
seems like a good idea to worry about the implementation.


steve
--
<Steve_Kilbane@cegelecproj.co.uk>
--

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