It drives me nuts when a developer documents something or other as being a "regex" but doesn't mention which dialect of regulation expression he's talking about. This habit is particularly common in the Rust, JavaScript, and Python communities, which seem to forget that their language's regular expression language isn't universal.
Why? Of course it means the dialect that is most directly supported by that language (by builtins or the standard library). And why should they have to consider other dialects? They aren't reading regexes from user input (or they'd be a lot more concerned about sanitization, catastrophic backtracking etc.), and their fellow developers all grok the conventions.
I’d imagine precisely because they might be collecting regexes from user input such as parameter values or search terms, and the user may not know or care which technology your tool or service is built with. However, they will need to know which regex dialect(s) you support.
And I’d further bet that people who are casual about specifying that are relatively strongly correlated with people who are casual about santization, catastrophic backtracking, etc. (At least based on code I’ve seen over the decades.)
Because I don't know what language your program is even written in! Why should I know or care that you chose, e.g. TypeScript, when I'm trying to use or configure your program and don't know how to spell this or that regex concept?
> It drives me nuts when a developer documents something or other as being a "regex"
> I don't know what language your program is even written in!
I legitimately don't understand how you're in this situation. If the documentation is telling you that something is a regex, and it's not a user-supplied regex, then that's something intended for fellow developers. If configuration expects a regex for some reason, that's a signal that you're expected to be a programmer to use the software; and you're presumably interested in it because you use the same language, or are at least familiar enough with the open source ecosystem to look these things up. If the software were meant to be used by people who can't do these things, it would be designed without those rough edges, but more importantly the documentation would be getting written by a non-developer.
> If configuration expects a regex for some reason, that's a signal that you're expected to be a programmer to use the software
1) What?
Only programmers are expected to use grep? What? That's absolute nonsense. Even programmers aren't programmers during every waking hour. My being a programmer in general doesn't make me a developer of your project, and I shouldn't have to become one by git cloning it to figure out how to write a config file.
Google Sheets and Excel have a REGEXMATCH. Do I have to be a programmer to use a spreadsheet? And even if so, do I need to guess the implementation language? No, because Google and Microsoft document their regular expression dialects (RE2 and PCRE, respectively), so you don't have to guess.
> If the software were meant to be used by people who can't [develop]...the documentation would be getting written by a non-developer
2) What?
No, that's also nonsense. Developers write programs for non-developers ALL THE TIME without some kind of technical writer intermediary. If the developer is any good, he'll realize that "regex" in documentation is ambiguous and write down the specific language he means.
Same applies to “Markdown”.