RE: Structural regular expressions

[Drew Adams]

> > That's the real point, I believe: the paper touts the use of regexps
> > to divide text into chunks that match - chunks that are not
> > necessarily lines, in order to then act on those chunks in some way.
> 
> Not a good base, I think -- regexps are not really powerful 
> enough to do the job well.

That's too vague.  Good base (= ?) for what?  Do what job?  How well is well?

We use regexps to select chunks of text all the time in Emacs.  Regexps are not
sufficiently powerful to select an _arbitrary_ chunk, but so what?  You can use
them to select lots of kinds of chunks (reg langs + Emacs "regexp" extensions) -
certainly more than just lines.

Nothing limits us to regexps (= one of my points), but regexps can be useful in
selecting chunks of text.