also, for what it's worth, I've moved on to mexp in my old age. Just easier to figure out where things begin and end without all those parens. And they more-or-less mechanically convert to sexpr when you need them to.
And back in my day you couldn't get a CS degree without a class on parsing and interpreting structured data. Usually it was the compilers class. Now we don't require kids to take a compilers class so an entire generation doesn't understand why regexes don't work in all cases. When kids in my organization try to "parse" HTML or XML with regexes, I hand them a copy of the O'Reilly Lex and Yacc book. And when they come back saying they can't understand it, I hand them the Dragon book. I guess I just think we should all feel that particular pain. Sorry for the digression, but I was triggered by "regex" and "parser" used in the same sentence.
And back in my day you couldn't get a CS degree without a class on parsing and interpreting structured data. Usually it was the compilers class. Now we don't require kids to take a compilers class so an entire generation doesn't understand why regexes don't work in all cases. When kids in my organization try to "parse" HTML or XML with regexes, I hand them a copy of the O'Reilly Lex and Yacc book. And when they come back saying they can't understand it, I hand them the Dragon book. I guess I just think we should all feel that particular pain. Sorry for the digression, but I was triggered by "regex" and "parser" used in the same sentence.