Nice to hear from you!
On 5/31/07, Ian Young <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, > I'm Ian, one of the two students working on improving the regexp > engine in Vim for this year's Google Summer of Code. I haven't had a > whole lot to contribute as of yet, but now that work is underway, I'll > probably pop up here asking lots of questions some days. > > Right now we're working on getting things set up and building a > testing suite, but I thought I would spark some discussion on a design > decision that will be coming up after we finish this phase, which is > whether to implement the new model ourselves, or use an alternative > engine, like TRE: <http://laurikari.net/tre/>. I'm tempted to > implement one ourselves, as it's an intellectually stimulating yes, and share the fun with us too... > prospect, but that doesn't mean I won't listen to reason if TRE or > another option is far better. I don't know much about the internals of > TRE, but according to previous posts to this list, it utilizes three > engines: a slow one for handling backreferences (presumably similar to > Vim's current engine), a fast one for most cases (what we are looking > to implement), and one for their 'fuzzy matching' feature. > > I have a couple questions to start things off. First: I couldn't see > much need for 'fuzzy matching' in Vim, but some of you are probably > much better acquainted with regexp use cases than I am. Would this be > a useful feature to have available? >From my previous experiences with the list, I think it can be left out for now. ( and nikolai believe even without the fuzzy stuff it would take a hell lot of effort ) > Second: We might have to do some > gymnastics to work with multibyte characters, as discussed here: < > http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vimdev/message/46408>. I haven't > worked with multibyte characters before, so I'm not clear on the > subtleties. Me neither. > Would this translation to wide characters before passing > to the engine cause much of a performance hit and/or be excessively > complicated to implement? On a side note, TRE's main page says it has > both wide character and multibyte character support. I couldn't find a > version history, so I'm not sure if this is a new feature that Nikolai > isn't aware of, or if we need something more. > > I'm interested to hear what you all have to say. We don't need to make > this decision until middle of next week at the earliest, but I thought > I would get the discussion going now. > > Ian > Best of luck ... - Asiri
