Subject: rx: (or ...) order unpredictable
From: Mattias Engdegård <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2019 19:40:33 +0100
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

The rx (or ...) construct sometimes reorders its subexpressions, which makes its semantics unpredictable. For example,

(rx (or "ab" "a") (or "a" "ab"))
=>
"\\(?:ab?\\)\\(?:ab?\\)"

The user reasonably expects (or e1 e2) to translate to E1\|E2, where ei translates to Ei, or a semantic equivalent. Not having this control makes rx useless or dangerous for many purposes.

The reason for the reordering is the use of regex-opt behind the scenes. Whether rx is the place to do this kind of optimisation is a matter of opinion; mine is that it belongs in the regexp engine, together with other, more aggressive optimisations (DFA, native-code generation, etc) could be performed as well.

We could determine whether any string is a prefix of another. If not, regexp-opt should be safe to call. Alternatively, this check could be done in regexp-opt (activated by a flag). That would be my preferred short-term solution.

(Speaking of regexp-opt, it has another bug that does not affect rx: it returns the empty string if given an empty list of strings. The correct return value is a regexp that never matches anything. Fix it, document it, or turn it into an error?)