Match problems...

• Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 20:21:03 PST
• From:
  Kipp the Kidd <mcmudge@mailbox.syr.edu>
• Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I made a verb called 'egrepchange' which would change things in verbs 
using regular expressions...  Because things in my MOO can be invisible, 
each object has to decide if it can see %t or not, so some other 
pronoun_sub isn't acceptable...  Now everything uses a 'notifyf' verb, 
that does the specialized substitutions.  I wanted to change all refs to 
$you:say_action to player.location:announce_all... But I wanted to make 
sure that ones with the fourth argument as 'where' didn't interfere, so I 
excluded $you:say_action calls that contain commas, I would do theese 
manualy.  So, here's what I typed:

egrepchange ^%$you:say_action(%([^,]*%));$/player.location:announce_all(%1);

It searched the core and did the changes in about 30 seconds.  No problems.
Then I realized, that verbs can have spaces before their expressions, so 
I added a ' *' to the beginning:

egrepchange ^ *%$you:say_action(%([^,]*%));$/
                                          player.location:announce_all(%1);

But THIS time, it took 5 minutes to grep the core...  Nobody is compiling 
on the machine, nobody is even logged in, except me...  Is this a speed 
bug in match?

Second...  I am not very sure about this, but, looking at .db files, I 
see that many of the expressions have spaces in them, for example:

foo:bar(a, b, c, d);

...Wouldn't it save some space, if the spaces were excluded;

foo:bar(a,b,c,d);

...I believe once when editing a .db file, I forgot to enter the spaces, 
and it parsed OK...  How easy would this be to implement?  Maybe even 
make another option to verb_code() that does this?

- Kipp

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