GNU bug report logs - #62272
Erroneous claim in grep man page

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Message #13 received at 62272 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: dakra137 <at> gmail.com
Cc: 62272 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#62272: Erroneous claim in grep man page
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:29:49 -0700

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

On 2023-03-19 02:27, David Kra wrote:

> TOBE: "Although the syntaxes differ, in GNU grep there is no difference in
> available functionality between basic and extended syntaxes."

I'm not a fan of "syntaxes". Although it is a word in computer science 
it grates in my ear because in linguistics "syntax" is a field of study 
and there is only one syntax just as there is only one rhetoric and 
there is only one logic.

Anyway (to get off my soapbox :-) there's a bigger problem in the next 
sentence, which says, "In other implementations, basic regular 
expressions are less powerful." That's not true for POSIX BREs, as they 
have back-references, which POSIX EREs lack. (This is documented in the 
GNU grep manual's "Problematic Expressions" section.) And I doubt 
whether it's true that PCRE2 is a strict superset of EREs so we should 
scale the wording back a bit there too.

I installed the attached doc patch, which I hope fixes these problems. 
(It also fixes a couple of troff typos I noticed in the neighborhood.)

[0001-doc-clarify-BRE-vs-ERE-bug-62272.patch (text/x-patch, attachment)]

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