[Snow-users-list] high-priority snow packages and package naming

Shiro Kawai shiro at lava.net
Sat Sep 15 22:06:29 EDT 2007


From: Thomas Lord <lord at emf.net>
Subject: Re: [Snow-users-list] high-priority snow packages and package naming
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:45:45 -0700

> Please, no such thing as match structures.   They are a botched design
> in Posix and Perl -- pure legacy.   Simulate them, better, in portable
> scheme atop a "true regular expression" back-end.

+1 for Tom Lord.

Submatches not only twist engine implementation, but also there are
incompatibilities in edge cases between implementations that can
bite you some day, for exmaple:

- If a capturing group matches more than once, which part of the
  string should be a "submatch"?  The first one matching the group,
  the last one?  Or every one of them should be saved and retrieved
  as a list?  I think I've seen all three types.

- If a capturing group may match an empty string, and it is inside
  repetition, how should it match?  A naive implementation can yield
  infinite loop, since it can match an arbitrary number of repetitions
  of "empty string".   Perl engine and Ruby engine differ in the
  interpretation of this case, though I don't remember the details.

The advantage of having high-level stuff in Scheme is that we can
set the semantics (or we can provide options) portably, instead
of relying slighly differing underlying implementations and
crossing our fingers to work.

I'm not sure the performance impact (and not so optimistic as Tom,
I guess), but if such portable high-level module is coming along,
I'm willing to optimize Gauche's low-level regexp engine toward it.

I heven't fully thought out Tom's suggested spec, but one concern
is the representation of match position in string---Gauche doesn't
like character index.  Internally Gauche's engine compiles given
regexp in an FA that works for octet-stream, and it only calculates
character index when requested (so, actually, in Gauche it may be
faster to get matched substring rather than indices of a submatch,
when the submatch is in the middle of a long mutibyte string.)
It would be nice if the portable high-level layer assumes that
the low-level engine returns implementation-dependent representation
of matched positions, instead of "character index".

--shiro







More information about the Snow-users-list mailing list