Re: Emacs-like file buffers

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Kevin Ryde <user42@zip.com.au> writes:

> Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> writes:
>>
>> I would really like to see Guile provide a fixed regular expression
>> format, one that doesn't vary depending on what the build platform has
>> available.  Without that, you cannot write scripts that are portable,
>> at least not with respect to regular expressions.
>
> If you assume you've got mostly posix then it's not too bad is it?

My impression was that Guile just uses whatever library it finds on
the system (if any), and that the library found might or might not be
POSIX compliant.  If that's correct, then I'd much rather have an
arrangement where we know exactly what kind of regular expressions
Guile will provide on *any* host system.

As motivation, imagine you're using Guile to write a cross-platform
tool that will need to use regular expressions to build a list of
files to pass to the equivalent of "rm -rf".

>>     POSIX, Emacs, Perl?
>
> The perl way has its fans.  I guess an add-on that let you get that
> instead or as well as the basic posix bits might be cute.

A while back I actually hacked up a preliminary (use-modules (pcre)).
(I probably still have the source around here somewhere.)

>>   - Is it acceptable to add an external dependency for regular
>>     expression suppport,
>
> It might have to be LGPL to maintain that status on the resulting
> program.

Right, though the main concern I was trying to raise was that, as it
stands now, Guile has very few external dependencies, and so we should
probably consider carefully the merit of adding any given new
dependency.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
GPG starting 2002-11-03 = 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592  F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4


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