Re: GNU Awk's types of regular expressions

Coming back to this...

On 29.11.2024 05:13, Kaz Kylheku wrote:

[...]
 
It could also (in combination with this) be lazy. [...]

Yes. There's already something like "on-demand logic" there, where
in  print > "a_file"  the file won't be created or overwritten if
the statement doesn't get triggered, and subsequent calls won't
overwrite it. So it would indeed be not surprising if such a
mechanism is implemented. (But I haven't examined the awk code.)

 
Someone will undoubtedly chime in confirming or refuting these
hypotheses.
 
It would be pretty silly if these regex objects didn't cache a compiled
regex across multiple uses.

True. But, OTOH, in GNU Awk there's a couple functions that are
just passed through to other (external) library functions. If these
functions happen to support only an interface like  match(re,str)
where match() supports no [thread-safe] static memory for "re"
the caller might have no choice. (Don't know how it's actually
implemented.)

Janis

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