On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Martijn van Steenbergen
For my mud client Yogurt (see hackage) I'm currently working on improving the efficiency of the hooks. Right now several hooks, each consisting of a regex and an action can be active at the same time. Every time a line of input is available (usually several times a second) I run the line through all the available regexes and execute the first matching action.
I figured this is not the cleverest approach and it'd be better if I |'ed all regexes into one big DFA. However, how do I then find out which of the original hooks matched and so which action to execute?
Is this really a problem in practice? I've done similar things in Ruby, which is a much slower language, and not had any issues - particularly in something IO bound like a MUD client it doesn't seem that running down a few tens of regexps would be a bottleneck of any sort. martin