Re: How are regexen implemented in Emacs?

[tomas]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 04:45:05AM +0100, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
> 
> >> Naive!
> >
> > And what are the reasons? Out of curiosity: would
> > implementing a FA-based one be a very big undertaking? (And
> > no, I won't do it, if only because I don't know C.)
> 
> C is not so difficult, but probably someone else did it
> already so it would be a matter of integrating and reusing
> that rather than writing it all over from scratch interesting
> as that may sound ...

The devil is in the details: each long-living RE implementation
develops its own useful warts, and they are all different. Stefan
already hinted at it, but you can't underestimate the weight of
(a) Emacs's existing corpus of code hidden away in REs and (b)
the one hidden away in its diverse user base's brains and
muscle memories.

So you better come up with some fully backward compatible thing,
whatever the implementation. I think the easiest would be to
substitute one little piece at a time :-)

Cheers
-- 
t

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