On 11 February 2005 21:24, Peter Simons wrote:

I was wondering why Text.Regex.Posix does not expose the Ptr interface to the regular expression library? Is there a deeper reason for that?

No deep reason that I'm aware of.

I am also worried about the fact that the module uses finalizers to free-up unused expressions -- rather than providing a bracket-style

withRegex :: String -> Int -> (Regex -> IO a) -> IO a

function.

We quite often use it with a regex defined at the top-level: r = mkRegex "..." f x = case matchRegex r x of ... Although in this case there is limited benefit from having the regex garbage collected, since there can only be a bounded, probably small, number of these in the program. Providing withRegex seems like a good idea, though.

Last but not least I see that the regex flags are represented as an 'Int'. I don't feel strongly about this, but IMHO a

data RegexFlag = IgnoreCase | Newline | ...

data type with an appropriate declaration for Enum would be nicer for this purpose.

Unless there is violent opposition, I'd volunteer to make those changes, because as it happens I need them anyway. ;-)

Please go ahead, I'll review and commit your patch. Cheers, Simon