Re: htags improvements.

[Shigio Yamaguchi]

Hi Luke,
> Specifically, htags now runs under "use strict;", which is pretty
> conventional. On a small source site, it shaved an average of 2 seconds
> off of a 23 second web site build time.
> 
> I also have updated the syntax to reflect more contemporary (and
> correct) perl coding style, and have made a small change to the anchor
> package. The anchors are stored as array references in the ANCHORS
> array, which eliminates the need for so many split() calls in that
> package.

Thank you for your patch. It's a good job.

By the way, one month age, I added the following comment to the top
of htags.in in CVS repository. Sorry for my late comment.

> # COMMENT FOR HACKERS:
> #
> # Htags is written so that it run even with perl4.
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/global/global/htags/htags.in.diff?r1=1.168&r2=1.169

I agree with refactoring and I want also to move to new perl early
in the mind.  But I'm hesitant to rewrite htags in perl5 style when
thinking about the caused troubles.

There are many version of perl in the world. And I know many people
were annoyed by the compatibility problem of perl.

For example, FreeBSD used perl4 up to a comparatively recent date
and even now it has only perl-5.005_03 which is comparatively old.

        FreeBSD 2.2.5(1997/10) - 2.2.8(1998/12)         perl-4.036
        FreeBSD 3.0(1998/10) - 3.1(1999/2)              perl-5.005_02
        FreeBSD 3.2(1999/5) - 4.9(2003/10)              perl-5.005_03

In FreeBSD project, in a certain period of time, hackers wrote some
commands using perl. It was thought to be a good idea. But in fact,
they were annoyed by the compatibility problem of perl. At last,
they removed perl from their core system and many utilities have
been rewritten as shell scripts or C programs.

I think we should rather move to C language for the performance and
the extendibility in the future. (It takes time though.)
Till then, it is safe to keep perl4 syntax, I think. I know that writing
program using just perl4 facilities, it works well in any environment.

Sometimes, I reflect my conservatism.  But the importance for the user
is that the program works well in everywhere, I think.
--
Shigio Yamaguchi <address@hidden> - Tama Communications Corporation
PGP fingerprint: D1CB 0B89 B346 4AB6 5663  C4B6 3CA5 BBB3 57BE DDA3