From a comment to Chicken-janitors regarding bug #1189 I saw this:
"This seems to be an undocumented feature of the substring-replace
function, which allows you to escape the backslash. I would recommend
using irregex, the regex egg's API is kind of deprecated anyway, and it's
also not very efficient."
Then in the regex egg wiki page I see:
"It is a thin wrapper around the functionality provided by
irregex and is mostly intended to keep old code working."
These statements leave me a little concerned as I use the regex egg a fair amount and I don't have the energy to learn yet another abstraction or to go back and rewrite old code. More importantly I expose the use of regexes to users of Megatest and logpro and they have no tolerance for doing something considered a "standard" in a different way, especially if it means using something that looks like Scheme.
From re-reading the irregex egg wiki page I think the only thing I rely on that is missing is the \1 substitution mechanism. Is there an alternative syntax? All I see is the following:
(irregex-replace "(.)(.)" "ab" 2 1 "*")
Which would be implemented using a destination of "\2\1*" in string-substitute. Converting an old-style destination string to the list of numbers and strings would not be too hard I suppose.
Thanks,
Matt
-=-