Re: Stacks, registers, and bytecode. (Oh, my!)

[Jarkko Hietaniemi]

> The fact that Perl 5's regex engine is a royal pain to deal with should
> be a warning to us.
> 
> Much of the pain of dealing with the regex engine in Perl 5 has to do
> with allocation of opcodes and temporary values in a non-standard
> fashion, and dealing with the resultant non-reentrancy on an ad hoc
> basis.  We've already tried that experiment, and it sucks.  I don't
> want to see the regex engine get swept back under the complexity carpet
> for Perl 6.  It will come back to haunt us if we do:

*standing ovations*

>   "Sure, you can download the object code for this 5 line Perl program
>   into your toaster...but you'll also have to download this 5 gigabyte
>   regex interpreter before it'll run."
> 
> That's a scenario I'd love to avoid.  And if we can manage to store
> regex opcodes and state using mechanisms similar to ordinary opcodes,
> maybe we'll not fall back into the situation where the regex engine is
> understood by only three people, plus or minus four.
> 
> Larry

-- 
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        # There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
        # It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen