Re: Stacks, registers, and bytecode. (Oh, my!)

[Dave Mitchell]

Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It may certainly be valuable to (not) think of it that way, but just
> don't be surprised if the regex folks come along and borrow a lot of
> your opcodes to make things that look like (in C):
> 
>    while (s < send && isdigit(*s)) s++; 

This is the bit that scares me about unifying perl ops and regex ops:

I see perl ops as relatively heavyweight things that can absorb the
costs of 'heavyweight' dispatch (function call overhead, etc etc), while
regex stuff needs to be very lightweight, eg

while (op = *optr++) {
    switch (op) {
    case FOO:
        while (s < send && isdigit(*s)) s++;
    case BAR:
        while (s < send && isspace(*s)) s++;
    ....


can we really unify them without taking a performance hit?