regular expressions

[Chris Uzdavinis <chris@atdesk.com>]

Is there any interest in improving the regular expression support in
mzScheme?  For example, I'd really like to have non-greedy
repetitions, and some of the other "nice" features that make the Perl
regexp so powerful.

There is a good library called pcre (perl-compatible regular
expressions) which has a license that looks to be usable in mzScheme,
and it would greatly improve the regexp suppport.  I'd like to see
mzScheme use this more powerful library.

I guess this leaves me with two (and a half) questions:

  1) if such a change were to happen, would it require someone outside
     to submit it to the mzScheme group, or is this the type of thing
     that the core group would be interested in implementing?

  2) if it were to happen, would this replace the existing regexp
     library, or just be implemented as an alternate library?  (I can
     see a need for backwards compatibility, though I also see a use
     for a more powerful library.)

  2b) If the two libraries were to co-exist, what would be a good way
      to distinguish one regular expression from another?  That is,
      what's a good naming convention for the scheme interface to the
      pcre library, considering if the current regexp interface won't
      change?

Thanks.

-- 
Chris