regexp type?

Toshi Isogai writes: There's no regexp "type", but there is a more convenient way to notate regexps: raw strings. Then this becomes (if (looking-at #r"\s-*\(in\|out\)\s-*") .... I don't believe that GNU Emacs supports raw strings yet, and I don't think the upcoming v23 does, either. Sure. Use Perl, not XEmacs. :^) Adding special syntax for regexps (which really are just strings as a data type; XEmacs does compile them to a special byte code, but this is entirely internal) would complicate lexing immensely ("/" is a valid symbol component, so (setq /bin/sh "/usr/local/bin/zsh-dev") actually sets the value of the symbol `/bin/sh'). A PCRE-compatible regular expression syntax would be far more useful ("#r" is only two extra characters), but it would require changing a lot of things to implement, and for backward compatibility it would have to exist alongside of the old-style regular expressions. So it hasn't been done yet. It would be possible to do something like (defun pcre-compile (regexp) "Rewrite the Perl-compatible regular expression REGEXP in Emacs syntax." ;; code goes here) and call it (if (looking-at (pcre-compile #r"\s-*(in|out)\s-*)) .... as a first step in that direction. You might want to look at the re-builder library (supplied in the XEmacs packages distribution) and the libraries referenced in it (such as rx, sregex, and lisp-re). I don't know whether any of them provide such translation, but it seems quite possible. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta