Re: [Bug-zile] Zile Lua: Gary, please feel free to look after the branch for now

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Brian,

On 4 Aug 2011, at 11:38, Brian Maher wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 9:58 PM, Gary V. Vaughan <address@hidden> wrote:
>>  - replacing lrex-gnu with LPEG's re module;
>>    Obviously this breaks emacs compatibility, but GNU regex is huge and
>>    lrex in general is still a source of build problems for me.
> 
> FWIW, lrex-gnu didn't build on OS X...

It can be built on OS X, but you have to do it all manually from the command
line, which is no fun at all :(

The trick is to manually build a libgnu.a from -fpic objects of regex.o and
supporting files from a recent gnulib clone, extract those objects from the
archive into the lrex_gnu directory, and then create a shared library from
them and the objects from lrex_gnu itself.  It's painful and error prone
but can be done.  Ping me if you'd like me to look up the recipe I used in
my shell history.

> plus, I'm more comfortable with
> the more expressive PCRE regular expression library, so I've got a
> "hacked" (maybe 2 line change) so that my Zile (or Zee if that is what
> we are calling the Lua version) which uses lrex-pcre.

PCRE is more expressive for sure, but it is just as much of a lumbering beast
as the gnu regex code.  Lua Zile and Lua C should remain in lockstep 
functionality
wise IMHO, and both of them are trying to emulate Emacs' regular expression
functions according to the principle of least surprise.

Zee was a cut down version of C Zile hosted on sourceforge several years ago,
and since I'm more interested in a nice editor written in and extensible in
Lua, I thought we might create third branch in git for a Zee inspired luaish
flavour of Zile that is not so worried about following Emacs lead...
i.e. 'master' is C Zile, 'lua' is Lua Zile, and 'zee' would branch from 'lua'
but replace all the elisp emulation with lua scripting, and the giant GNU
regexp dependency with native Lua regexps, or if they turn out not to be
powerful enough, then maybe LPEG expressions too.

> I can't comment on using LPEG's re module since I don't have
> experience with that, but something more like PCRE would be a welcome
> change to me :-).

On reflection, it ought not to be much of a problem to add a configure
switch that allows Zile to use PCRE rather than GNU regexps... care to
submit a patch?

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)