Kevin Ryde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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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