[gobo-eiffel-develop] Object-oriented byte-codes for regular expressions?

[Colin P. A. <co...@co...>]

Classes RX_PCRE_MATCHER and RX_PCRE_BYTE_CODE_CONSTANTS violate the
single choice principle as they both contain giant inspect statements 
on the operation code. And the list of operation codes is defined in
yet a third class (RX_PCRE_BYTE_CODE_CONSTANTS).

The pure OO way would be to have a class for the concept of the machine
operation and descendant class for each operation. But as these
classes can't be expanded, there is cost associated with this,
compared to using a 32-bit integer to represent instructions (which is
a resonable model of a 32-bit microprocessor instruction - that is -
its the model an assembler programmer has).

I have to decide which way to go for the Unicode engine I am working
on.

Any opinions one way or the other?
-- 
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire