Re: Emacs-like file buffers

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

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

> Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> writes:

>> 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.
>
> I'd probably only go so far as help someone link to a decent library,
> a "--with" option on configure or whatever.  Non-posix libc would
> probably hurt many programs so you could argue guile needn't try too
> hard to overcome it.

I still think there's quite a lot to be said for the fact that in Perl
(and I assume Python) you can write the equivalent of

    (if (regex-match FOO filename)
      (rm-rf filename))

and know for *sure* that according to the official documentation
(barring an implementation bug) you will get the exact same behavior
on every supported platform.

Frankly, without some guarantee like that, I would think twice about
trying to write regular expression based, cross-platform scripts (in
particular, destructive programs) using Guile.

Of course if we could add a mandatory, full POSIX regular expression
test suite to make check (whenever regular expressions are available),
then that, along with suitable documentation, would be one way to
solve the problem.

-- 
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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