Re: [patch #4604] Fix left anchors and -w problems

[Charles Levert]

* On Wednesday 2005-11-09 at 23:08:14 +0000, Julian Foad wrote:

> Use a pointer if it 
> makes the code clearer (in callers and callees).  This is not an inner loop 
> so code clarity is more important than speed efficiency.

I will use a pointer.  I found out that to
use a pointer, I must actually recompute it in
several places.  Something like:

    if (start_ptr)
      start_ptr = new_buf + (start_ptr - old_buf)

Normally, that would argue for using an offset
instead, except that all those places are bound
to disappear when we fix UTF-8 and match_icase
issues.  I prefer to make the code that will
stay for the long run more readable, rather than
avoid these temporary adjustments.

The only place that will remain where a pointer
won't look natural is in the PCRE-calling
code, but that code is minimal in term of its
complexity since we offload all the work to
this library.