Re: A little more regex.h pedantry

[Reuben Thomas]

On 30 July 2010 23:23, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
>    deprecate the manual setting of those particular fields,
>
> As I recall, Kathy and I wrote all that based on actual usage (Emacs was
> the main thing we looked at).  I am not in favor of "deprecating"
> anything that has been around so long, precisely because it has been
> around so long.  What is gained?  I hope something besides pedantic
> cleanliness.

Thanks to Eric Blake for an actual use and justification for setting
fastmap manually. There's nothing like real use!

So, no getting rid of that. (I was hoping it wasn't possible any more
and that things could be simplified.)

> BTW, if you look for "xx" in regex.texi, you'll see more things that we
> didn't finish back then.  And as far as importing it wholesale, I'd be
> amazed if the RE_ bit settings and API functions haven't changed (been
> added to, at least) since then.

I have not yet found any change since 0.12, which is no surprise, as
most of the focus has been on the POSIX API since before then. In any
case, I'm not suggesting re-using it verbatim, at least, not without a
read-through.

So, my current candidate paragraph reads:

/* This data structure represents a compiled pattern.  Before calling
   the pattern compiler, the fields `buffer', `allocated', `fastmap'
   and `translate' can be set.  After the pattern has been compiled,
   the `re_nsub' field is available.  All other fields are private to
   the regex routines. */

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