Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg • Hacker News Board

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#41

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Feb 14, 2011, 6:06 PM UTC

zeugma wrote: post #35

nicpottier wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, no argument there, though being "highly annoyed" may point to some grumpiness. It is clearly not a regex engine, but it operates like a very very naive one, and uses the Perl syntax for them. Ultimately Regex just seemed like the easiest / clearest way of describing the functionality. IE, if I say "Skype supports the Perl Regex syntax for simple word substitution" you probably instantly think of s/a/b/. Maybe I s…

Historicaly it is more a sed like syntax..

And 'sed' is even easier to say than 'perl regex'!

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#42

Post by T-hawk » Mon, Feb 14, 2011, 6:20 PM UTC

hackermom wrote: post #21

words* a whole lot of CPU cycles.

At the cost of mental cycles of your recipient reader to parse what just happened, which come in much less available quantity than network bytes or CPU cycles.

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#43

Post by ck2 » Mon, Feb 14, 2011, 7:57 PM UTC

So how does it look in your logs?

I will pay you $1,000 to do this project for me

(at end of chat)

s/$1,000/$1

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#44

Post by j_baker » Mon, Feb 14, 2011, 9:41 PM UTC

nicpottier wrote: post #31

unwind wrote: post #25

I find it highly annoying that this, as far as I understand, really doesn't use regular expressions. The s/that/this/ syntax is not , of course, a regular expression. The regular expression is the thing that might go into the "that" part, an expression that can match against several different inputs. If all it supports is literals, it's not really worth calling it a regular expression, in my opinion. The article expr…

Oh, no argument there, though being "highly annoyed" may point to some grumpiness. It is clearly not a regex engine, but it operates like a very very naive one, and uses the Perl syntax for them. Ultimately Regex just seemed like the easiest / clearest way of describing the functionality. IE, if I say "Skype supports the Perl Regex syntax for simple word substitution" you probably instantly think of s/a/b/. Maybe I s…

I probably would have said "It supports sed-like substitution" (or maybe even s/sed-like/vim-like/). Generally speaking, regular expressions denotes finding something while this does more than that. Regardless, this level of pedantry shouldn't come as a surprise on HN (I admit to being guilty of it myself).

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#45

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Feb 14, 2011, 10:50 PM UTC

djacobs wrote: post #40

djacobs wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. This is simple substitution. (If we're going to call this a regex mechanism, so is Find/Replace in Word.)

I don't mind downvotes, but what are they for? (I upvoted the parent post out of the negatives and now I'm there... I guess that's karma huh.)

Sometimes they come from fat fingering the downvote button on a cellphone. Such downvotes are usually rectified eventually.

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#46

Post by baddox » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 12:03 AM UTC

unwind wrote: post #25

I find it highly annoying that this, as far as I understand, really doesn't use regular expressions. The s/that/this/ syntax is not , of course, a regular expression. The regular expression is the thing that might go into the "that" part, an expression that can match against several different inputs. If all it supports is literals, it's not really worth calling it a regular expression, in my opinion. The article expr…

I think that's a bit grumpy. It's fair to call this "regex," not because it's exactly a regular expression matcher, but because it clearly borrows its syntax from a popular regular expression engine (one that's traditionally used for simple word replace in chat windows). Similarly, most people use the term "regex" to refer to the full engines in most programming languages, which are often much more powerful than actual regular expression matchers (e.g. back references).

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#47

Post by AdamGibbins » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 12:10 AM UTC

limmeau wrote: post #18

tmachinecharmer wrote: post #15

Valentines day special guy> I love you darling! girl> GO 2 HELL!! guy> s/love/hate guy> s/darling/bitch

Last time I tried, I could only edit my posts while the other one hadn't answered yet. So: haha, but no.

You can right click any message in your history and hit edit.

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#48

Post by roryokane » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 5:02 AM UTC

When I first found this feature, I tried to write an email to Skype to thank them for including it. Sadly, there is no way to do such a thing. I looked all over their website for a contact email address, and I finally found one on a hard-to-find page, but when I wrote my message to it, I just got an auto-reply saying basically “please don’t send email to us. Call us or open a support ticket.” Opening a support ticket just to say “thank you” didn’t seem right. It’s sad that the company provides a way for people to complain about the program not working, but not for people to thank the makers of the program. (And I don’t think it’s because thank yous are useless to the company – knowing what your customers like is valuable feedback.)

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#49

Post by roryokane » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 9:41 AM UTC

tacoe wrote: post #33

How is this an easter egg? Been using it for years.

It’s an easter egg in that there is no documentation for the feature, and it is one that only people who are “in on the joke” (use IRC) would look for. The feature being functional doesn’t prevent it from being an easter egg.

Re: Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg

#50

Post by cgart » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 12:31 PM UTC

You do not need to type in /s/blah/anotherblah, it is already enough that you just hit the 'Up'-key on your keyboard. You then can edit previously written text!!!

It is really interesting that nobody points this out ;)