Re: Pattern matching proposal: %B to match balanced string with specified escape

[Jonathan Goble <jcgoble3@...>]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 3:25 AM, Nagaev Boris <bnagaev@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 11:13 AM, Jonathan Goble <jcgoble3@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The catch here is that in order to create a module containing my new
>> functions (find, gmatch, and gsub in addition to match), I (assume)
>> would have to copy-and-paste all of the pattern matching code, roughly
>> 500 lines of code, into my new module, just to change about 10 to 15
>> lines. That does not seem like a reasonable plan of attack.
>>
>> The only reasonable way to do this, unless I'm missing something, is
>> for the change to be made in stock Lua, which is not asking that much
>> (given the simplicity of implementation and the lack of any backwards
>> compatibility issues).
>>
>> The only alternative I can see is for me to maintain a lightly
>> modified fork of Lua on GitHub that makes my changes available,
>> possibly by defining a symbol like LUA_CUSTOM_BALANCE. I'm considering
>> doing this anyway, but at this stage, I'd really rather not be
>> maintaining a fork.
>>
>
> Maintaining a rock is simpler than maintaining a fork. And it worth to
> make a rock even if it was added to stock Lua, because a rock can be
> installed in Lua 5.1.

Not quite, because again, I'd have to copy the entire pattern-matching
system. While I can see the benefit of making a rock, said rock would
contain large amounts of duplicated code that would need to be updated
for almost every release of Lua, same as a fork.

I'll consider it, though.