Fwd: Emacs-like file buffers

[Jason Meade]

On 5/13/06, Rob Browning <address@hidden> wrote:
> "Jason Meade" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Since Perl's source is available, why not just grab its regex engine
> > and drop it into guile? If that's no good for licensing or other
> > reasons, then there's always PCRE (http://www.pcre.org/).
>
> Either of those would be a possibility, but first we'd have to come to
> a decision about whether or not we wanted Guile's official regular
> expressions to be Perl format.

...

> And of course there are also arguments in favor of the other formats
> (POSIX or Emacs).  I'm OK with any of them; I'd just like to have a
> standard.

~~ *sigh!* I forgot to cc the group... :( ~~

Is there a standard for regular expressions somewhere? It seems like
most implements (from grep through tcl, perl, and beyond) seem to
agree on simple stuff like ^[a-c]?002*[^b]+$ etc... (not all
understand ? and + I've noticed....) but very few seem to share an
affinity for \w or \< ... \> etcetera.

I don't use regular expressions (outside of grep) everyday, but when I
do use them, it's usually for some serious pattern matching, with
variable capture (via $1, or \#1 etc). I'm starting to incorporate
search-forward and search-backwards into my filebuffer lib. For that
kind of work, even strchr will work (sorta. binary data is a problem).
However, eventually I'll want to be able to regex my buffers, and once
I add the guile hooks, it would be nice to share the same regex syntax
with everyone else. After all, the last thing you want is to load a
module, only to find that it's not syntax compatible with the rest of
the language!

-Jason