On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 12:10, Carsten Dominik
<address@hidden> wrote:
I would like to have parenthesis, but since the parsing is done by
string
processing, any parenthesis in one of the search strings would be
difficult
to handle.
Have you considered using Lisp syntax, perhaps as an alternate?
Benefits include: trivial to parse (no parsing at all -- let Lisp
parse and maybe even eval for you!), easier for the user to remember
(for some of us :)), orthogonal, easy to extend (even with
user-defined functions), easier to quote and escape, consistent,
standard, free of precedence lists, proven technology,
pretty-printable, print-readable, etc.
The old syntax can easily be converted to sexp, thus separating syntax
from semantics and ensuring that the behavior is the same -- without
making anybody have to switch.
Just a possibility.