From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <75504d05c991d9e14a40acdbc4bfa7c7@vitanuova.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] first capital letter in function names at man pages, why?
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 19:42:08 +0100
From: rog@vitanuova.com
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> you'd better write N parsers.

actually it's not an unreasonable idea to have a regular expression
engine that could work on arbitrary alphabets.
you could express it quite nicely with the new limbo
polymorphism stuff:

	match[T](c: chan of T, p: ref Regex[T]): int for {
		T =>
			eq: fn(t: self T, t1: T): int;
			eof: fn(t: self T): int;
		}

so the alphabet would consist of members of type T, arriving down
channel c, being matched against a previously compiled pattern p.

match would return when it enounters a match, or reads a t such that
t.eof() is true.

then you could write N parsers and just plug 'em in.

i've got something that would allow one to use this kind of stuff
with a shell-like syntax. it's awaiting a bit more of my time...