[clean-list] questions

[Brian Rogoff]

> > There's nothing better than regexps for string handling
> 
> Until you found out about combinator parsing (type this in in Google or
> CiteSeer). I have a library based on Koopman's and Rojemo's work
> (continuation passing style), extended with elaborated error messages.

I agree that combinator parsing can be a lot nicer, and that regexps have
lots of nasty features, but they're so popular as a string manipulation
tool that I consider it a deficiency of the libraries that there is no 
Perl-like (yuck, I said it :) regexp library for Clean. 

In either case (regexps or combinators), I think it would be a good idea to 
provide a substring based interface, a-la Hansen or the SML Basis library. 
These provide a natural way for an FPL to do string processing. Here are 
some refs 

     http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~wjh/papers/subseq.html
     http://www.standardml.org/Basis/substring.html

-- 
-- Brian