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   Epidiah (epidiah@dice.camp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Mar-2024 05:04:35 JST Epidiah

   #DnD magic-users cast a spell & forget it. Folks like to point at this and say that makes D&D's magic Vancian.

   This bugs me for many reasons I don't care to enumerate. I encourage you to read some Jack Vance if want to know more. It's all in books.

   While this cast and forget quality is a delightful constraint in Vance's fiction, it's an awkward trope in D&D's pastiche. The latter does not feel like the former. So I'd like to humbly propose a new term for D&D's version: Regexian.

   Hear me out!

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   • Embed this notice
     Epidiah (epidiah@dice.camp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Mar-2024 05:04:34 JST Epidiah

     in reply to

     Regexes are D&D magic-user spells.

     You need at a least an hour to compose one.

     You're going to want a full night's sleep (and preferably a fresh cup of coffee) before you even think about tackling that task.

     The moment you finish typing one out, it is impossible to decipher what it does or how it does it.

     Even copying and pasting one is a task fraught with arcane peril.

     And, I mean, can you think of a more D&D-sounding phrase than "Regexian Magic"?

     Of course not. There isn't one.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Saturday, 16-Mar-2024 05:08:25 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @epidiah For the awful use of regexes as an extreme case of code golfing which gets cargo-culted everywhere: Sure.
     
     For the sensible use of regexes as a way to do things like extract simple patterns and then use the rest of the language to combine them (as intended, see awk and yacc): Not more forgettable/arcane than other pieces of code.
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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Saturday, 16-Mar-2024 05:31:09 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @epidiah Possibly, not familiar with D&D has I haven't played it but sounds like the stuff that could describe usage of grep/sed/… and the text-editors equivalents at least.
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     Epidiah (epidiah@dice.camp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Mar-2024 05:31:10 JST Epidiah

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan So, like, cantrips?