Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> >   I have really hard time believing that they aren't fixing it because they
> > don't want to break existing programs. 

> Well, there's always the possibility that they just don't find it 
> economically worthwhile. But yeah, you'd be surprised at what existing 
> programs rely on, bugwise. :-) I *don't* think it's because they can't 
> figure out how to fix it. I think it's an intentional business decision, for 
> whatever reason, not a "our compiler writer guys can't figure out how to fix 
> this."

  Since this sidetrack started with you being surprised why compiled
regexps in .NET present exponential behavior (when it's possible to make
them linear-time), are you suggesting that the reason for that *is* because
they don't know how to (in contrast to this C preprocessor issue, which
might have economic reasons behind it rather than competence reasons)?

  Whatever the reason for either one of these two things might be,
my suspicion is that the reason is primarily laziness in both cases:
They could figure out how to do it properly, and they could implement it
properly, but they won't bother because it works "well enough" as it is
now. That's why I brought up this C preprocessor issue as an example.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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