Re: Emacs-like file buffers

[Kevin Ryde]

Rob Browning <address@hidden> writes:
>
>   - How is the addition of support for Unicode likely to affect any
>     regular expression or buffer work?

Oh, I see what you mean.  Yes, no doubt a utf-8 aware regexp library
would be needed.

To turn around what I said about glibc, glibc in the right setlocale
does it, but I think it'd depend on having and finding a utf-8 locale
that's been enabled in locale.gen (or wherever).  Switching back and
forward with setlocale would no doubt be as horrible as the same thing
we do with tzset, though when I measured it setlocale was pretty fast
(unlike tzset).

> My impression was that Guile just uses whatever library it finds on
> the system (if any), and that the library found might or might not be
> POSIX compliant.  If that's correct, then I'd much rather have an
> arrangement where we know exactly what kind of regular expressions
> Guile will provide on *any* host system.

I'd probably only go so far as help someone link to a decent library,
a "--with" option on configure or whatever.  Non-posix libc would
probably hurt many programs so you could argue guile needn't try too
hard to overcome it.

> A while back I actually hacked up a preliminary (use-modules (pcre)).
> (I probably still have the source around here somewhere.)

That sounds good as an add-on.