Re: features of PCRE-OCaml

[John Max Skaller <skaller@ozemail.com.au>]

Markus Mottl wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 08 Dec 2000, John Max Skaller wrote:
> > Funny. Python 1.5.2 used the _same_ C library by Philip Hazel. :-)
> > Given the fact this library builds DFA's instead of NFA's, Python
> > ought to be faster than Perl. :-)
> 
> Well, the matching engine is not everything... ;)

	It is for code doing extensive matching of long strings
against a single pattern: everything else should be dwarfed
by the match time.

> > Note also, Python 2.0 uses a modified library which does something
> > PCRE-OCaml cannot: it works with Unicode characters (supposedly).
> 
> To my knowledge, Phil Hazel is working on support for this. Unless the
> PCRE-library supports Unicode (and unless OCaml does ;), there is not
> much one can do about it...

	What? You mean it isn't generic enough to just change
'char' to 'short' and recompile?  [:-)]
 
> I am not sure whether it is really necessary to have a Str compatible
> interface: the regular expressions are already different so exchanging
> the old against the new library would break code anyway.

	If the expressions were translated?

	BTW: I think some of the features of the regex are
parochial, and should be eliminated: support for case insensitive
matching, and matching 'words' etc should be dropped. Such things
might make sense in English, but are much too hard to build in
to a regexp facility correctly for internationalised text.

	By the way, how big can the DFA tables get?
Does it eliminate duplicate columns? 

	[Ocaml lex cannot support large enough tables for matching
ISO-10646 identifiers, when encoded using UTF-8. This is a real pain,
since all my languages specify UTF-8 encoded ISO-10646: I have to 
cheat, and assume 'almost everything' is a suitable character to
put in an identifier, and then check it afterwards. This makes it
hard to use use special symbols as tokens. I'm not sure why
this is, but I guess it doesn't eliminate duplicate columns?]

-- 
John (Max) Skaller, mailto:skaller@maxtal.com.au
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