Re: [boost] Announcing: xpressive

From: Eric Niebler (eric_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-11-17 11:40:41

(Resending -- this bounced the first time)

Joel de Guzman wrote:

 > Hartmut Kaiser <hartmutkaiser_at_[hidden]> wrote:
 >
 >> Eric Niebler wrote:
 >>
 >>> xpressive will differ from Spirit in that it will have
 >>> backtracking semantics. (Spirit has greedy semantics, and
 >>> does not do backtracking.)
 >>
 >>
 >> But Spirit does backtracking!
 >
 >
 > I think Eric means: does not do exhaustive backtracking:
 >
 >     *ch_p('a') >> ch_p('a');

Yes, that is what I meant.

Hartmut Kaiser wrote:
 > How this does relate to the Spirit regex parser? Do you see any
 > possibilities to combine these two?

The Spirit regex parser is built on top of Boost.Regex, which is 
dynamically-bound; that is, you must specify a regex as a string to be 
interpreted at runtime. xpressive will allow statically-bound regular 
expressions. I see no possibilities to combine the two.

Hartmut Kaiser wrote:
 > Please add me to your list of interested people, who wish to
 > collaborate. I'm especially interested in a lexing component for Wave,
 > which does not rely on Re2C, but is equally fast, but well integrated
 > into the C++/STL idioms.

Excellent!  This will be a good goal to work towards.  If you could send 
  me a list of the regular expressions Wave uses, I can work to make 
sure xpressive can handle them.

Cheers,
-- 
Eric Niebler
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com