Rx, the Perl Regular Expression Debugger

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I wrote a technical paper about Rx for TPC 2001, and it was accepted, but that meant that I was scheduled to talk about it. The paper was a big success. I was very happy with the way it came out, and the project won the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility, which was worth some money.

Then a funny thing happened: People would come up to me at the conference and say "Wow, I heard your paper won a prize, I guess I'll have to come to your talk." Now does that make sense? If the paper wins a prize, you should read the paper! Duh!

And I knew the talk was not going to be anything special, because I hadn't written one. I had already written everything I wanted to say about Rx in the paper and I didn't feel like repeating myself---I had visions of standing up for twenty minutes and reading from the paper. Finally I decided that when time came to give the talk, I would demonstrate the proof-of-concept demo application I had hacked up, and then ask for questions. I couldn't do the demo because the conference people didn't deliver the software they promised, which was OK, because Michel Lambert had just demonstrated his debugger, which was just like my demo, only better. So I took a few questions and then went on to the next talk, Dirty Stories About the Regex Engine.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that there is no Rx talk, but instead you should read the paper, which is really good. If you have Perl/Tk, you can even run the demo programs yourself and see what the folks at the conference missed.




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