On Tuesday 20 January 2004 20:00, Jacek Sieka wrote:

A) because the vast majority of users don't have the slightest idea of what
a regular expression is

but the majority does not mean everybody. The majority of people have feet but this does not have prevented automobile creation ;-)

B) because it would require a 3rd party library (or very much work) to
create a BASE compilant client on the biggest target platform, i e it's not
part of the C standard library

I am not sure about this. When I do a "man regex", it is classified in man(3) and it is in POSIX.2. Moreover, there is no libregex anymore since ... a long time :)

C) because they are slower (indexed searches become tricky for instance)

It is not slower (see earlier mails in the mailing list for test results) and indexed searches are mainly a matter of index organization.

D) because if there's demand for it, it's very, very easy to add to the
protocol and mandate by the hub (using sup)

then why not add it immediatly if it is so easy :)

Eric