From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2005-08-04T01:13:55+09:00
Subject: Re: array or with non-array

Hi,

In message "Re: array or with non-array"
    on Thu, 4 Aug 2005 00:58:51 +0900, Caleb Clausen <vikkous@gmail.com> writes:

|Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
|> Again, it's a matter of cost.  For example, full duck typing
|> Regexp#match likely requires re-implementation of a regular expression
|> matching engine in Ruby.
|
|Not really, no. You can read into a buffer and match against the
|buffer. This works pretty well for every pattern without anchors.
|Supporting anchors too requires a smidge of rewriting the Regexp at
|runtime. My current implementation interprets ^ and \A (or $ and \Z
|when matching backward) as matching at the current file position,
|rather than the beginning of file.
|
|It's a minor pain, but I have most of the necessary code already.
|There's a compromise or two that have to be made: an upper limit on
|the length of a single match, ^ won't work right in some rarer cases
|until regexp lookback in ruby 1.9. I don't like this, but these
|restrictions seem minor enough, considering the massive increase in
|functionality otherwise.

It's good to hear it's not impossible.  Although I'm not agree very
much about "massive" increase of functionality.

							matz.