At 8:06 PM +0200 5/23/2000, Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:
>At 19:16 23.05.00 +0200, Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:
>>I was looking for some perl-style regular expression code for 
>>Squeak.  Searching the web I found some Squeak code written by 
>>Andrew C Green [...]
>
>Bad habit to quote oneself, I know, but I want to add an additional 
>question after I found out that Andrew's code allows \1 
>backreferences: Has anybody tested this on 2.8a and even prepared a 
>plugin for Solaris 7?

My plugin still works on 2.8a, though it could certainly use an 
interface shakedown (it was one of my first Squeak projects).  The 
code is utterly plain vanilla C, and should compile on any platform 
-- the key question is supporting the memory management model.  The 
only tricky platform in that regard was MacOS.  I would start with 
the HP-UX code if you are so inclined.

The reason I chose PCRE, as opposed to a Smalltalk implementation was 
two-fold: (1) I couldn't find a Perl-compatible Smalltalk 
implementation, indeed, even one that was close; and (2) PCRE is a 
solid, regularly-maintained implementation, written in a highly 
portable language.

PCRE is the library used in Python, in PhP4 and in various other 
high-visibility projects.  This is not to vouch for its virtues, but 
merely to suggest that a solid user-base is committed to testing and 
maintaining it.

Any Smalltalk-based implementation would likely run substantially 
slower, unless hacked so that it could be pluginized.  On the other 
hand, it seemed unlikely that anyone would built such a plugin and 
maintain it as agressively and consistently as Hazel has PCRE.

I had intended to build a Smalltalk/Plugin version of PCRE based on 
the original code, but got distracted by other projects -- the 
existing code worked very well, and other functionality that didn't 
exist seemed to want to be built first.

If there is any interest, I'd be inclined to do a rebuild of the 
plugin for the most recent PCRE version.
-- 
Andrew C. Greenberg		acg at netwolves.com
V.P. Eng., R&D, 		813.885.2779 (office)
Netwolves Corporation		813.885.2380 (facsimile)
www.netwolves.com