Subject: Re: bug#16581: suggested code simplification in dfa.c

From: Aharon Robbins <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 04:50:47 +0200

Hi Paul.

I skimmed the patch.

All that exclusive-ORing looks a little scary to me. Will that work,
for example, on EBCDIC systems?  Gawk supports z/OS - a POSIX enviornment
on top of OS/390.  Will it work on systems using some of the older
far Eastern, non-Unicode locales?

What is it even doing?  What do you expect to get from

	wc ^ towlower(wc) ^ towupper(wc)

?

I'm worried that you've embedded a deep assumption about how characters
are encoded and how upper and lower case relate to each other in
every possible character set we might be called upon to handle, and
it feels really risky to me.

I think I'd be happier if you did the simplification in smaller, more
comprehensible, steps.

My two cents, of course. :-)

Thanks,

Arnold