Re: Please hold, a pumpking will be with you shortly

On Sun, 4 Aug 2002, Michael G Schwern wrote:

> I'm currently travelling around and won't be ready to organize this show for
> a week or two yet.  I've already put the wheels in motion to set up the
> necessary infrastructure, so that should all be ready to go once I've
> settled down.

One question before you go too far:  Would you consider doing
perl2 instead of perl1?  I ask because the perl2/Changes file lists
the following two items that I think are particularly relevant:

    New regexp routines derived from Henry Spencer's.
        Support for /(foo|bar)/.
        Support for /(foo)*/ and /(foo)+/.
        \s for whitespace, \S nonwhitespace
        \d for digit, \D nondigit


    The manual is now not lying when it says that perl is generally faster
    than sed.  I hope.

There's lots of other stuff too, but having the same basic regex
engine as later perls might be useful for benchmarking.  Also,

>     Small scale portability, modernization and bug fixes preferred.

lots of perl1 bug fixes can be found already implemented in the perl2
sources.

I recognize that perl2 doesn't have the same marketing appeal as perl1,
and that may ultimately be more important, but it's worth a moment's
thought.

-- 
    Andy Dougherty		[email protected]
    Dept. of Physics
    Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042