Re: segfault in glib-mkenums

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

on 9/15/01 4:52 PM, Owen Taylor at otaylor redhat com wrote:

> For complicated regular expressions, Perl's use of recursion is not
> really inappropriate ... the code in Perl's regular expression
> engine is complicated enough without rewriting it to simulate
> recursion using a manually mantained stack!
> 
> But I believe, and testing I've done here seems to confirm, that the
> makeenums.pl regular expressions do _not_ require excessive amounts of
> stack space.

I know this is slightly off the point, but I feel the need to plug the book
that covers this topic better than any other I've heard of.

The O'Reilly book, Mastering Regular Expressions, has extensive coverage of
this issue. The chapter that dives into the idiosyncrasies of Perl has a
section, "Removing C Comments", that sums up the previous remarks with what
it calls a "crisp solution" for this specific application.