Re: Best practice or cargo cult?

[rinceWind]

I have a copy of PBP in front of me, and the chapter on regular expressions goes into great detail explaining why these should be used all the time.

If the statement "always use /xms" is presented in isolation, then someone presenting this must be prepared to explain why - or cite the pages in PBP.

I don't think that this is advocating cargo cult programming practices any more than recommending "always use strict and warnings" is.

[Juerd]

I don't think that this is advocating cargo cult programming practices any more than recommending "always use strict and warnings" is.

No, those help catch errors. They don't change semantics.

/m and /s change semantics in ways that are most of the time unneeded, and sometimes even unwanted.