Re: [exim] PCRE virtual addresses

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Author: Jan Ingvoldstad
Date:  
To: exim users
Subject: Re: [exim] PCRE virtual addresses
On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 10:15 AM, Phil Pennock <pdp@???> wrote:

> On 2015-02-26 at 08:01 +0100, Jan Ingvoldstad wrote:
> > I'm not sure that I've ever seen a paid Exim consultant. :)
>
> https://github.com/Exim/exim/wiki/Commercial
>
> > The great thing about farming decisions out to Perl, is that this is
> where
> > PCRE came from. ;)
>
> No, PCRE comes from Exim, designed and written by Phil Hazel for Exim
> but then split off into a separate package and picked up by many other
> products. It's designed to mostly emulate how Perl handles regular
> expressions, warts and all.
>


I think we have a case of classic miscommunication here.

I consider Perl to be the origin of PERL compatible regular expressions,
technically speaking.

Yes, the library was created by Phil Hazel, and it definitively solves a
lot of problems for people who need Perl-compatible regexps where they
otherwise cannot run Perl itself.

This was especially important at the time Phil created the library, and for
at least a period of time, PCRE developed new features quickly, and even
briefly surpassed the feature set of Perl's regexps.
--
Jan