miniblog.

When a tool supports both regular expressions and literal strings, which should be the default? If you default to regex, users can match more strings than they realise (e.g. `foo.txt`) or less (e.g. `foo(bar)`). I typically see regex as the default, but I prefer the opposite.

@tristanC That's an option! There's often cases where you know what the user wanted though, so you can provide a sensible AST that the toolchain can handle. For example, a malformed string literal can still be parsed a string so type checking etc can be helpful.

Seen in the wild: replace all the newlines with a literal $ in sed: sed -e 's/$/$/' It's always bugged me that regex replace syntax looks similar to regex, occurs close to the search syntax, but actually has a different meaning. It's harder to read.