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Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:39:58 +0200
From: "Reini Urban" <rurban AT x-ray DOT at>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Limited regex support in newlib cripples syntax highlighting in nano
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2008/8/1 Tomi Belan wrote as "Limited regex support in newlib cripples
syntax highlighting in nano"
> Cygwin regex.h implementation doesn't support some special sequences,
> for example \< (beginning of word), \> (end of word) and \b (word
> boundary). This causes a usability bug with the nano editor, which
> uses these sequences extensively in most of its syntax highlighting
> rules.

Posix regex is much faster then perl-style pcre regex. Syntax
highlighter usually prefer fast over complete. So the term "crippled"
should be used with care.

See e.g. http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html - Regular
Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast (but is slow in Java, Perl,
PHP, Python, Ruby, ...)  - which complains about the typical POSIX
spencer implementation also.

-- 
Reini Urban
http://phpwiki.org/ http://murbreak.at/

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