GNU bug report logs - #36496
[PATCH] Describe the rx notation in the lisp manual

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From: Mattias Engdegård <mattiase <at> acm.org>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: Noam Postavsky <npostavs <at> gmail.com>, Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org>, 36496 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#36496: [PATCH] Describe the rx notation in the lisp manual
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2019 13:31:06 +0200

7 juli 2019 kl. 04.29 skrev Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>:

> Thanks, LGTM.

Thanks for reviewing! Pushed to master.

7 juli 2019 kl. 01.56 skrev Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org>:

> Would it be feasible to format it differently so that it comes out as
> fewer pages?  That might be possible by using Texinfo a different way.

One way, already mentioned, would be to merge the character class descriptions for rx and string regexps. That would save about one page, at the cost of making the list slightly messier since rx has synonyms for each item which are not legal in string regexps ([:digit:] vs `digit', `numeric' and `num').

Eliding the categories table would save another page, if we accept a reference to other formats or the rx doc string.

I see little room beyond that. We could remove the examples, but they are short and doing so would make an already dry section even drier.

> Here's another idea: document the two syntaxes in a single table,
> where each item says how to do the job in a regexp
> and how to do it in rx.


Probably not a bad idea and one that would put the syntaxes on equal footing, but it involves a complete rewrite of all the regexp sections; more than I am prepared to do right now.

Should this bug be kept open for possible improvements to the print manual, or can we regard that as a separate issue?

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