Regex Pronouns?

By Artyom Bologov

¶ I have a friend who lists vi/vim as vis pronouns. It's obviously a programmer joke, but quite an illuminating one. vi/vim pair is conventionally contracted to vi(m) shortcut pattern. Why not apply that regex-y approach to other pronouns?

¶ The syntax I'm suggesting is not necessarily PCRE or POSIX regex. I'm rather suggesting a sloppy soup of PCRE, UNIX wildcards, and English. Kind of like what programmers do when they talk about *nix, GNU/Linux, or jpe?g.

¶ Binary pronouns are a bad example: /h(e|im)/ might sound like home, but it's a pain to type. Another binary pronoun pair regex that I can come up with is a horrifying /s?her?/. Not only it looks out of this world, it's also bad at describing the structure of the pronouns. Is it she? her? sher? he? So messy.

¶ Other, less widespread pronouns are much better as regex pronouns:

• Aforementioned vi/vim as /vim?/
• /the(y|m)/, /xe(y|m)/
• /its?/
• or the "any pronoun" person as *

¶ Neat, huh? My pronouns officially are /t?he(y|m)?/ now, what are yours?

¶ Update: thanks to many people on r/programming subreddit, This post now has better regex start/end markers and better expressions for where I had unoptimized syntax. And to people of r/programminghorror, for productive feedback.