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cybmole, chill. We're supposed to be on the same side here.
Despite his Praky-like respons, cybmole does have a point. To us, conventional shorthand means the same thing as standard terminology; to someone who's not familiar with it, it doesn't. There really are people who don't know that a "regex" and a "regular expression" are the same thing. I'm married to one, and I'm not married to an idiot; just to someone who doesn't geek in the quite same directions as I do. We don't need to dumb down material, we need to smarten up users -- but we need to give those users somewhere to grab hold. This should include both using some standard of terminology in documentation, and providing a glossary where they can find out what it means if they don't already know. "Regex" is a low-content term for a complicated concept; at least "regular expression" is made of words that make some kind of sense, so the reader can hold onto some hope that they can eventually learn what those words mean in this context and how they go together. Calling them "fluffy unicorns" would be wrong because that's not a standard term for the concept; "regular expressions" is both standard and meaningful.
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