At 10:57 AM -0400 8/28/02, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
>Would it be _possible_ to create a non-backtracking implementation of a
>Perl 6 pattern engine, or does the existence of backtracking-related
>operators preclude this possibility in advance?
In general, no of course it's not possible to create a
non-backtracking perl regex engine. Far too much of perl's regexes
requires backtracking.
That doesn't mean you can't write one for a specific subset of perl's
regexes, though. A medium-term goal for the regex engine is to note
where a DFA would give correct behaviour and use one, rather than
going through the more expensive generalized regex engine we'd
otherwise use.
If you want to head over to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and pitch in on
the regex implementation (it's being worked on now) that'd be great.
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
