Re: Exposing regexp engine & compiled regexp's

[Nathan Torkington]

Damian Conway writes:
> I once wrote a C++-based regex engine (much simpler than Perl's!)
> just like this.

I once brutalized Henry Spencer's engine into telling me when I was
on my way to a match.  This was for a UI: I wanted to be able to say
that the input should only match this RE, and if they typed something
that broke the match, I could beep and disallow the character.

I was just a greenhorn then, so it coredumped.  But it's another use
for access to internal engine states and failure reasons.

Nat