Re: lynx-dev reverse search

[Kim DeVaughn]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2000, Thomas E. Dickey (address@hidden) said:
|
| On Thu, 27 Jul 2000, Kim DeVaughn wrote:
| >
| > Ah yes ... I remember now from when I added external editor capability
| > to TEXTAREA's.  And unfortunately, at least one of the structs is only
| > singly linked ... :-( ...
|
| I had an impression of that.  But a nice utility function that searches
| from the top of the page to the previous struct would alleviate that.

Yes, that would do the trick (and is what I think Vlad was suggesting
in his "rude hack" msg :-) ).

FWIW, I considered converting the TextAnchor struct to doubly linked,
when I was working on the external editor stuff, but didn't because I
didn't see any problem with performance, even on some moderately big
pages.  It wasn't worth the time, effort, and *risk* in trying to find
*every* place in the code that would need to update a newly added "prev"
pointer, for a very marginal increase in performance (if such could be
discerned at all in realtime).

WRT doing so for some kind of reverse search function, I'm inclined to
feel the same way ... most pages are short enough that performance is
probably not an issue with an always-start-at-the-top approach; only on
very lengthy docs might it become one.


On the subject of regexp's ... yup, that'd be a nice thing to have ...!

On the down side, as someone (Vlad ?) mentioned, there are a number of
different RE libs out there ... some with various, uhmm, "shortcomings"
(aka, bugs) in them; choosing the "best" one to use isn't at all obvious
(as we discovered in mutt development, a couple years ago).

Then there's the multi-platform problem (UNIX, VMS, DOS, OS/390, ...).

And mention was made of unicode support (and other multi-byte stuff).

I forsee alot of ifdef's and/or config options ... all of which *could*
be done.  But is it really worth it?

/kim

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