[squeak-dev] Support Regular Expressions in Trunk

Levente Uzonyi leves at elte.hu
Wed May 13 17:25:09 UTC 2015


On Wed, 13 May 2015, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote:

> Am 13.05.2015 03:02, schrieb Levente Uzonyi:
>> On Tue, 12 May 2015, Hans-Martin Mosner wrote:
>> 
>>> Am 12.05.2015 17:07, schrieb Levente Uzonyi:
> ...
>>>> The plugin should use the platform's support library, instead of some
>>>> ~10 years old version.
>>> Please, no! It's much easier to work with some old library that has 
>>> consistent behaviour everywhere than it is to find and work around the 
>>> differences between platform libraries e.g. on Windows, Linux, and some 
>>> regular UNIX variant. At work I need to do that with VA Smalltalk code 
>>> page conversion (UTF-8 to ISO8859L1 and back) - code that works on the 
>>> client doesn't work on the server, so there's a special case and 
>>> workaround needed to get everything right.
>>> The only acceptable option if you really want to use an external library 
>>> would be to include a standard regex C library with well-defined 
>>> functionality in the VM.
>> 
>> Are you saying that the PCRE library behaves differently on different 
>> platforms?
>> 
>
> Nope, PCRE should behave consistently across platforms if the same version is 
> installed on those platforms (although I'd be somewhat unsure about its 
> handling of line ending conventions and unicode/different character sets on 
> different platforms.)
> But I was responding to "platform's support library" which might be anything 
> from PCRE through some POSIX compatible regex (from the GNU C library or some 
> other implementation) to anything else that might be there (see 
> http://unixpapa.com/incnote/regex.html for a list of possibilities).

The RePlugin is a wrapper for the PCRE library, so what I'm saying is that 
we should use the system's installed PCRE library (or statically link an 
up-to-date version), instead of a really old fork of it.
The PCRE API won't change anymore, since PCRE2 is here.

Levente

>
> Cheers,
> Hans-Martin
>
>


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