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I talked to Aharon Robbins (gawk maintainer) about gawk's regexp implemetation vs libc vs others (rx & Henry Spencer's code). He basically said: - don't use rx, - gawk uses GNU regex & dfa from grep. - The main advantage is the ability to turn on & off "particular syntax features". - The main disadvantage is that it's slow & occasionally very flakey & very hard to fix if bugs show up. - Spencer's stuff is very well-written & very fast. - If it wasn't for inertia & the fact that it's less flexible, then he'd switch to Spencer's code. Also, I discovered that STk uses TCL's regexp code which is Spencer's code & it seems to be faster than gawk's code in the stupid test that I've been doing. Upshot - It'd be a better idea technically to use Spencer's code than gawk's code. Question - Is it a problem using Spencer's code, given that it's not GPLed? I'd assume yes from previous discussions on the list, but I'd assume no from Robbins' comments that he'd switch to it for gawk if it wasn't for flexibility & inertia (i.e. - reading btw the lines says that the licensing isn't an issue). -- Harvey J. Stein BFM Financial Research hjstein@bfr.co.il