On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 06:17:09PM -0400, David T. Lewis wrote:
> On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 10:27:20AM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> > I love the idea of well-integrated expressions etc being available for string handling and in tools. The tricky bit is that ?well-integrated?.
> > 
> > If at all possible it should be done without any extra primitives. Unless we have a convincing use case for such string handling needing to be frequently done and very fast I don?t see much value in adding more C code. With Cog and SISTA making the system so much faster we have to consider the possibility that doing all the marshalling, converting, stack fapping, c-code calling, returning, re-converting may take more time than leaving it to Smalltalk.
> > I suppose the counter-argument would be that using a standard library guarantees correct results. Except of course we have a lot of experience with supposedly standard libraries being utterly screwed. Jpeg libraries, anyone? ALSA?
> > 
> > As for the actual expression grammar, I imagine most people would be assuming the unix regexp form which has the advantage that a lot of people are familiar with it. And the disadvantage that a very large number of people are not.
> >
> 
> There are two distict packages.
> 
> The package at www.squeaksource.com/Regex is the Vassili Bykov implementation.
> It requires no plugin support or special primitives.
> 
> -- Regular Expression Matcher v 1.1 (C) 1996, 1999 Vassili Bykov
> -- See `documentation' protocol of RxParser class for user's guide.
> 
> The PCRE package is Andrew Greenberg's Perl compatible regular expressions.
> This uses the RePlugin plugin that can be found in the VMMaker package.
> RePlugin is an internal plugin in the Unix VMs (interpreter/cog/spur), I'm
> not sure about other platforms or SqueakJS.
> 
>   http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/558
>

Actually there are probably more than just two. SqueakMap also has BRegexp:

  Description:
    BRegexp is Perl5 compatible regular expression library for Squeak.
    -Supports multilingualized Squeak.
    -Supports only Windows environment.

  Home page:
    http://kminami.fc2web.com/Squeak/Goodies/BRegexp/index.html

SqueakMap has the Andrew Greenberg PCRE as "Regular Expression Plugin"
which seems to load despite an error that pops up in the SAR postscript
processing.

I do not see an entry in SqueakMap for the Vassili Bykov Regex package.

I am fairly sure that regex enthusiasts will have excellent reasons for
favoring the Perl compatible PCRE in some cases (fast, powerful, well
documented), and equally excellent reasons to favor the Vassily Bykov
implementation in other cases (portable, all Smalltalk, works in SqueakJS).

So it seems to me that both of these excellent packages deserve good
entries in SqueakMap to make them easy to find, and easy to load in
the latest Squeak images. If that is done, then I cannot think of any
reason that either one of them would need to be maintained within trunk.

Or to say it another way: If these packages are not important enough to
make them easily loadable from SqueakMap, then they are not very important.
If they are not very important, then we should not put them into trunk.
So please make them loadable :-)

Dave