I wanted to ask you folks about your experiences dealing with regular
expression packages.
One common complaint about the Guile 1.0 release was its size and
complexity. Guile 1.1 attempted to address this, by getting rid of a
bunch of peripheral support libraries. However, one library we got
rid of was Rx, our regular expression implementation. Rx is kind of
big and fancy, so I think this was a significant simplification.
However, this means that Guile now relies on the regexp routines
provided by the system libraries. The configuration script checks for
the presence of the POSIX regexp routines, and enables the interface
if they are present. On systems which lack the POSIX regexp routines,
Guile 1.1 does not support regular expressions.
I've noticed that neither SCSH nor Tcl have taken this route. They
both include their own regexp matchers. This suggests to me that you
folks know something about regexp routines that I don't. Something
unpleasant.
Why did you decide to include your own regexp matcher?
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