Re: perl regexp's and stk - that was easy

From: Erick Gallesio <eg_at_unice.fr>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 22:36:28 +0100 (CET)

Brian Denheyer writes:
>
> I got the pcre 2.04 library and hooked it in as a dynamically loadable
> module. The pcre package is very nice with lots of goodies which are
> found in perl.

PCRE is on my list of TODO things since Xmas. An d
that's true that it seems a nice package. I have not tried to
benchmark it btw. Do you have (or someone on the list)? tried to see
how efficient is this implementation.


>It can even do character tables so you can pattern
> match in your favorite language, like French :-)

I have tested it but it doesn't work for French :-< It seems that my
localization stuff is not completely ok ;-)

>
> Please provide some comments on what you would like to see for use :
>
> 1. the perl compatible regexp package as a separate loadable module as
> I currently have it, with some name-hacks to separate it out from
> the existing package.
>
> 2. Use an "auto-config" define to _replace_ the current regexp
> package.
>
> Let me know. In the meantime I'm it is for "internal" use, but if I
> get any requests I'll clean it up (needs a little more work) and put
> it on my website for all.
>

As I said before, it's a rather long time that I envision to switch to
PCRE. There was two reasons which have stopped me:

      - The TODO list of Tcl said that they want a perl compatible
regexp package for Tk 8.1. Since I was happy with the performances of
the Henry Spencer (and since I know that his package has also evolved)
I thought that it would be fine to continue with the Tcl stuff. I had
a look to the current beta version of the Tcl today. This was a quick
look and this is not a definitive advice but the code seems
complicated and not very pretty (e.g. C code which include other C
files...). A lot of complexity seems to come from Unicode. Anyway,
PCRE seems better packaged than it.

     - The copyright of PCRE is not clear. The package seems to have a
liberal license but I don't understand the implications of restriction
about program which use the GPL (but I have not contacted the author
about that). But perhaps possible solution could be to dynamically
load PCRE with STk, as you suggest. As always these problems about
licenses are very boring, but I feel that we'll have to deal with them
more and more (see the recent thread about the inclusion of the
readline library in the Guile mailing list)

                -- Erick
Received on Wed Feb 24 1999 - 22:32:24 CET