Log24

Seize the Day

From a March 31 entry —

A Jesuit cites Quine:

“To be is to be the value of a variable.”

— Willard Van Orman Quine, cited by Joseph T. Clark, S. J., in Conventional Logic and Modern Logic

For example, the variable

in the Crystal Software program EasyPattern Helper supposedly helps to find any valid day number, 1-31, within a date, by first translating  “[Day]” into the regular expression

(?:(?:0?[1-9]|[12]\d|3[01])).

But it turns out that this expression fails to find the day “22” — at least during a trial run in the EasyPattern Helper search window.

The following seems apt:

“A tongue-in-cheek comment by programmers is worth thinking about: ‘Sometimes you have a programming problem and it seems like the best solution is to use regular expressions; now you have two problems.’  Regular expressions are amazingly powerful and deeply expressive. That is the very reason writing them is just as error-prone as writing any other complex programming code.”

— David Mertz, Learning to Use Regular Expressions

The following irregular expression also seems apt:

&3#!+*^$#!!