On Sunday 20 June 2004 3:43 am, Russell Penney wrote:
>    I have looked at using the regex package but noticed by looking at other
> code that it isn't really used in a lot of places. So I umm'd and errr'd
> and decided to leave it alone for the moment.
>
> So is it more efficient to use regex? Or is the ease of use/maintaining
> better with regex? Inquiring minds wish to know :)

Both. There is a lot of random string manipulation code in Squeak that would 
be *much* simpler with regex usage.

> If it turns out that regex is better/faster/stronger than cobbling together
> a parser, I would vote that Squeak had it included as standard (SMACC for
> complex stuff and regex for simpler stuff)

I'd love to see it included. However, the one that Andy Greenberg wrote and 
that I've been maintaining on SqueakMap requires a plugin, and so people with 
old VMs would have to update (the RePlugin is distributed with all the VMs 
now, as far as I know).

I should separate the pieces so that people without VMMaker could load the 
package...

There are also some all-Smalltalk regex packages available; I haven't tried 
them or compared them against the plugin-based one (which is quite fast and 
complete, and comes with a number of tests).

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/