Re: Glib Regex?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

NotZed <notzed@helixcode.com> writes:

> Why not just use the 'standard' regex functions.  They are fairly portable
> and there are free libraries where the system ones dont work.

Note that it isn't just a question of whether the the interfaces
are portable or not, the regular expression flavors have to
be portable too. People should not have a regular expression
that works on one version of glib, but not 

So, we could only use the system regex support if the system
had POSIX regular expressions. 

glib's configure.in would have to have a test suite to 
see if the system's regular expressions were "sufficiently
standard".

Having our own regex package guarantees compatibility, and
is, thus a lot simpler, since we'd have to provide a fallback
anyways.

> IMHO it would be worth adding if it supported unicode, or something
> that the standard api doesn't, otherwise is the bloat worth it?

Actually, in my opinion, the advantages of Perl-style regular
expressions over POSIX regular expressions are pretty substantial
in terms of useability. And they are more familiar to most people,
from:

 Perl
 Python
 Javascript
 ...

And we will need the "bloat" of our own regular expressions 
implementation when we support Unicode - that may not be
by GLib-1.4, but it needs to happen.

Regards,
                                        Owen