Extending regexps to other kinds of sequences

[Philipp Marek]

> I'm pretty sure that someone already did this, i.e. they forked
> CL-PPCRE for arbitrary sequences.  But I can't remember the details
> right now.  You'll probably find a link hidden in the mailing list
> archives.
I tried quite some time ago to change the RE-compilation into a macro, so that the
_whole_ needed code would be visible to the compiler in one compile unit.

That should have enabled quite a few optimizations - starting from matching against a
base-string, an (unsigned-byte 8) vector, any other sequence ...


But I didn't get that far ... I'd have had to reimplement most of the existing code,
resp. convert everything to return forms. That got a bit messy, too.

So later on I decided that the expected performance-improvements would be reached faster
by waiting for 18 months (to get the CPUs catch up) than trying to completely reinvent
the wheel here.


Regards,

Phil