June 1, 2004

• Seize the Day

  From a March 31 entry –

  A Jesuit cites Quine:

  “To be is to be the value of a variable.”

  – Willard Van Orman Quine, cited by Joseph T. Clark, S. J., in Conventional Logic and Modern Logic

  For example, the variable

  “[Day]“

  in the Crystal Software program EasyPattern Helper
  supposedly helps to find any valid day number, 1-31, within a date, by
  first translating  “[Day]” into the regular expression

  (?:(?:0?[1-9]|[12]d|3[01])).
  

  But it turns out that this expression fails
  to find the day “22″ — at least during a trial run in the EasyPattern
  Helper search window.

  The following seems apt:

  “A tongue-in-cheek comment by programmers is worth
  thinking about: ‘Sometimes you have a programming problem
  and it seems like the best solution is to use regular
  expressions; now you have two problems.’  Regular
  expressions are amazingly powerful and deeply expressive.
  That is the very reason writing them is just as error-prone
  as writing any other complex programming code.”

  – David Mertz, Learning to Use Regular Expressions

  The following irregular expression also seems apt:

  &3#!+*^$#!!

  • 3:31 pm
  • 1 Comment