On Fri, Aug 18, 2000 at 08:46:17PM +0100, Richard Proctor wrote:
> There is one significant area of perl that has very little attention here
> (other than one of my RFCs) that is regexs.
>
> Perl has very powerfull regexs - but what other features might be desirable?
Well, one thing that has acatualy come up (on -language-io, BCCed) is less
powerful regexes. Specificly, making an additional /f modifer that told the
compiler to use a faster DFA matcher instead of the default super-powerful,
but slow one. (/d for DFA has been proposed, but I rather like f for Finite
and Fast.)
The DFA engine's language would be a proper subset of the full regex
engine's, and at least version 8 regular expressions: character classes,
alternitivies, grouping parens (not certian about capturing parens, def
no backreferencing).
The idea is that putting a /f on should (almost) always increase speed, but
won't allow as much expressiveness.
-=- James Mastros
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