Re: GNU Awk's types of regular expressions

On 02.12.2024 00:18, Aharon Robbins wrote:

 
And of course, you can always look at the source code.

While I do that occasionally with some [better known] software
packages I'm not familiar with the GNU Awk source code and it
would IME require quite some analysis, how it's structured,
what's going on, and in the end you are typically never quite
sure whether it does what you think it does.

This isn't meant as a statement of quality of software design
or existence of useful comments in GNU Awk. It's only so that
last time I looked into the sources (with the intention to add
new syntax and semantic for a feature I'd have liked) I wasn't
able to identify how to do it without doing harm to the code;
I'm lacking the familiarity with this source code. Of course I
could have looked into the source code instead of posting, but
the described experience lead me to not take that path.

Re "(where I'll see it)": My post's intention was not meant to
address/bother you personally - yet, all the more I appreciate
your reply! In this newsgroup there's also some folks who have
some expertise and might answer such questions. And I'm not a
"client" of the mailing list. (Just to make you understand why
I used this Usenet communication channel.) And finally, there
was some discussion recently in another newsgroup about Regexps
and I wanted to initiate a potential discussion on the topic.

Janis