Re: Structural regular expressions

[David House]

On 10 September 2010 16:43, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:
> Could someone please explain what a "structural regular expression"
> means?  The message that started the thread did not say.

It is not a property of the regexps themselves, but pertains to
functions that use regexps: namely that they only apply to a subset of
your buffer. For example, you might do a query-replace-regexp on only
the comments of a C file, or an isearch-regexp on only the strings. So
note that the subsets they apply to are non-contiguous in general.

It has been proposed to support this by generalizing the concept of
the region to actually be a list of (contiguous) regions. Another idea
further up was to use special text properties.