Re: 3rd Party Nonsense (was Re: Regular Expressions?)
Re: 3rd Party Nonsense (was Re: Regular Expressions?)
- Subject: Re: 3rd Party Nonsense (was Re: Regular Expressions?)
- From: glenn andreas <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:01:55 -0500
On Jun 7, 2008, at 12:37 PM, Kevin Grant wrote:
It is possible to link your application through C to an
interpreter like Python or Perl, and rely on the built-in
regular expression libraries to do your work. If you
really wanted to, you could fire off a call to /usr/bin/egrep.
That last one would possibly be the worse of all possible ways - the
cost involves spanning another process (potentially for each regex),
sending a potentially large string to it, parsing the output back from
it to get any sort of results, made all the more complicated by the
fact that there are all sorts of weird involved when sending non-ASCII
to another process (since environment variables get involved to
determine encoding schemes - and you have no way of knowing what the
user set up in the hand full of default encoding environment
parameters that exist).
NSTask works great for some things - shlepping large amount of string
data back and forth for a simple utility isn't one of them.
These are all part of the default Mac OS X platform, they
require no dependency on a bundled framework, and have no
license issues.
Can't speak for Perl, but the Python framework changes from OS version
to OS version, which can potentially cause problems with linking to
it, so suddenly this introduces an OS dependency. There is no
"forward compatibility guarantee" that is implicit in various parts of
AppKit (granted, there are occasionally problems there, but those
tend to be the except
In all honesty, you wouldn't want Apple to "implement" this
itself, because they'd have to start from scratch and there
would be bugs. I listed 3 implementations that are very
mature and powerful.
Except that there already is a very good regex engine as part of the
OS (ICU) which is used by some parts of the system already - it's just
not fully exposed in Cocoa (so it's not like they'd be implementing it
from scratch at all). Asking that they take that last step seems like
a very reasonable request (and it has been discussed for many-an-OS-
release).
Glenn Andreas email@hidden
<http://www.gandreas.com/> wicked fun!
m.o.t.e.s. | minute object twisted environment simulation
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