Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!snorkelwacker!think!compass!worley
From: worley@compass.com (Dale Worley)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Force exact matching of tag name
Message-ID: <1499@compass.com>
Date: 8 Feb 90 16:01:00 GMT
Organization: Compass, Inc., Wakefield, MA
Lines: 25


   From: kim@spock (Kim Letkeman)
   Newsgroups: comp.emacs
   Date: 5 Feb 90 14:00:02 GMT

   We made similar changes in our environment, but with one major
   difference. We created a second function called find-tag-exact. This
   function performs the exact match on a word boundary. We did this
   because of the fairly severe penalty you pay for regexp searching over
   string searching (the difference is very noticeable even on a sun4.

I don't entirely understand this.  Matching on a word boundary doesn't
really get the job done, since, say, a "-" is a non-word character.
Thus, "find-file" matches "dired-find-file" on word boundaries.

Also, I don't see how you can avoid the penalty for regexp searching
if you restrict your matches to occur on word boundaries, since that
*is* a regexp search.  If there is some clever trick using string
searches and other tests that's faster than an equivalent regexp
search, then the regexp code needs to be improved!

Dale Worley		Compass, Inc.			worley@compass.com
--
If the United States were really a democracy, we would have concentration
camps for AIDS patients.