[boost] Review: Regular Expression Library

From: John Maddock (John_Maddock_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-08-17 06:27:30

Beman,

Thanks for the comments,

>*  Having a class named "reg_match" and a function named "regex_match" 
>caused some confusion.  Consider renaming reg_match to
regex_match_results, 
>match_results, or similar.

Point taken, I would like to preserve some kind of backwards compatibility
though for existing users - I guess deriving reg_match from match_results
or whatever would do it (but not documenting reg_match), I'd like to keep
the name not too long though - what do people prefer for the name of this,
ideas?

>* The documentation would be more inviting to new readers if it began with

>a simple tutorial paragraph or two, before diving into the reference 
>material.  A "hello world" level example would suck people in and get them

>interested.

Point taken, I just run dry when I try to write that kind of stuff... I'll
put my thinking cap on :-)

>* The code snippets show the power of regex.  They should be commented a 
>bit more and made accessible directly from index.htm.

OK

>*  vc6.bat:  Had to add -I to nmake command so del command failures 
>wouldn't cause termination.  This may be a Win2K issue.

That file is being replaced - I have a shell script now that auto-generates
makefiles for gcc, VC6 and C++ Builder, it has better dependency checking,
and puts each build variation in its own sub-directory.  Something similar
could probably be leveraged for boost as a whole if required.  (I think
that if you check the zip an early version of the new VC6 makefile may have
made it in by mistake - called vc6_test.mak).  Let me know if you want to
take a look at these...

[Misc doc error snipped]

OK I'll get those fixed.

>*  Add title lines and // see www.boost.org... lines to source files per 
>guidelines.  (Don't blame John for not following this part of the 
>guidelines; they have only just appeared.)

Yep, I'm going to expand the file names a little and move the files from
boost/detail to boost/re_detail to separate this from other misc. boost
files (I think that this will simplify maintenance in the long run)

>*  Use of _MSC_VER to identify the Microsoft compiler.

Don't you mean that should be BOOST_MSC_VER?

>*  "identifier truncated to 255 characters" and similar useless warnings
on 
>lib build compiles. This is general boost irritation; we ought to figure a

>way to avoid it.

This is a perennial pain, in theory its easy to fix with the appropriate
#pragma warning, but in practice some standard library include files turn
the warning back on again, and I've never been able to successfully
suppress this in regex++.

- John.