[Mono-list] frozen regex support?

[Daniel Stodden]

On Wed, 2002-09-04 at 04:29, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> > growing your would require recompilation for mono for any application
> > depending on regex support.  has .net compat been dropped from the
> > agenda and i haven't been notified?
> 
> Well, I do not understand as well as you do what the issues involved are
> here.  Without digging deeper I believe that if things are opaque, we do
> not ever need to depend on it.
> 
> You believe that my evaluation is wrong, so please explain us with more
> detail what is the problem -because from your short message I could not
> figure it out myself- and maybe we can investigate the problem that way.

ugh. sorry, no trolling intended -- i thought the problem was already
self-explanatory for some people, since Dan Lewis already wrote so much
code and telling from what's in cvs, i'm sure he's aware of the problem.
i thought it might have already been discussed at some point.
just did not find any hints in the archives yet.

so regexes can be precompiled. i guess the .net sdk delivers some
userspace tool or some other kind of support to do this. i've just tried
the class library representation.

attached are two programs:
1. "regex2.cs", which when run creates a compiled regex in "regex.dll".
2. "regexusage.cs", which shall be linked against the precompiled regex
from step 1.

i like it, and i guess i'm not the only one. unfortunately, the contents
of regex.dll depend on a bunch of protected fields and methods in Regex
and, worse, the exact nature of System.RegularExpressions.RegexRunner.
Which, as i assume so far, comes close to reverse engineering the entire
regex execution machinery not only functionally, but bit by bit.
verbatim.

my primary question so far is: while i never really saw the need to
refer to ildasm output for what i've ever committed so far -- this is
different. is it legally okay to write code based at least on dissing
those generated .dll files? honestly, i'm not sure.

regards,
dns

-- 
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