diff etc/NEWS @ 45800:d11816fe2c59

New multi-line regexp and new regexp syntax.

--- a/etc/NEWS	Thu Jun 13 10:57:55 2002 +0000
+++ b/etc/NEWS	Thu Jun 13 11:15:46 2002 +0000
@@ -569,6 +569,23 @@
 
 ** Etags changes.
 
+*** New syntax for regular expressions, multi-line regular expressions.
+The syntax --ignore-case-regexp=/REGEX/NAME/ is now undocumented and
+retained only for backward compatibility.  The new equivalent syntax is
+--regex=/REGEX/NAME/i.  More generally, it is --regex=/REGEX/NAME/MODS,
+where `/NAME' is optional, as usual, and MODS is a string of 0 or more
+characters among `i' (ignore case), `m' (multi-line) and `s'
+(single-line).  The `m' and `s' modifiers behave as in Perl regular
+expressions: `m' allows regexps to match more than one line, while `s'
+(which implies `m') means that `.' matches newlines.  The ability to
+span newlines allows writing of much more powerful regular expressions
+and rapid prototyping for tagging new languages.
+
+*** Regular expressions can use char escape sequences as in Gcc
+The escaped character sequence \a, \b, \d, \e, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v,
+respectively, stand for the ASCII characters BEL, BS, DEL, ESC, FF, NL,
+CR, TAB, VT,
+
 *** In Prolog, etags creates tags for rules in addition to predicates.
 
 *** In Perl, packages are tags.
@@ -596,9 +613,6 @@
 will read from standard input and mark the produced tags as belonging to
 the file FILE.
 
-*** Regular expressions can use char escape sequences as in Gcc
-These are the escapes \a, \b, \d, \e, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v.
-
 +++
 ** The command line option --no-windows has been changed to
 --no-window-system.  The old one still works, but is deprecated.