On Wednesday December 2, 2009, I wrote: > On Wednesday December 2, 2009, Simon Marlow wrote:
> > Can we rely on the availability of regex.h and POSIX regexes? Does > > this need a configure test? > > I don't know the answer to this. Isn't POSIX part of the baseline > assumption? If not, I would need some help with the autoconf changes, > since I haven't done any before. Googling this subject, I came across Jan Wolter's "Unix Incompatibility Notes: Regular Expression Libraries" (see http://unixpapa.com/incnote/regex.html). Wolter's advice is: "All Unix systems seem to have some form of regular expression parsing library that can be invoked from C programs, however they are not very compatible with each other. Both the regular expression syntax and C- language API vary considerably. "The best solution for programmers wishing to use regular expression routines in portable C programs is probably not to depend on the regular expression libraries that may be found on the host computer, but to include a copy of Henry Spencer's implementation of the POSIX 1003.2 standard (http://arglist.com/regex/) or Philip Hazel's Perl-Compatible Regular Expression Library (http://arglist.com/regex/) in your distribution. This is what Apache, MSQL and many other packages do. The copyright terms on for these libraries are liberal enough so that almost anyone should be able to make use of them, and both packages work well." This advice seems reasonable to me. (Perhaps one of these libraries is already being included in GHC? If so, that is what I will use.) Otherwise, I think either would work fine for my minimal use. Please give me feedback on how to deal with this. Thanks. Regards, Howard _______________________________________________ Cvs-ghc mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-ghc
