James Mastros wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2000 at 08:46:17PM +0100, Richard Proctor wrote:
> > There is one significant area of perl that has very little attention
here
> > (other than one of my RFCs) that is regexs.
> >
> > Perl has very powerfull regexs - but what other features might be
desirable?
>
> Well, one thing that has acatualy come up (on -language-io, BCCed) is less
> powerful regexes. Specificly, making an additional /f modifer that told
the
> compiler to use a faster DFA matcher instead of the default
super-powerful,
> but slow one. (/d for DFA has been proposed, but I rather like f for
Finite
> and Fast.)
>
The choice of algorithms is a great idea, but why do we need a modifier?
Isn't it a pretty straightforward set of rules that allow us to decide if a
DFA matcher will work? It would be a lot nicer if Perl could just notice
that the regex could be handled by its DFA matcher, all by itself.
