Re: square bracket vs. curly brace character ranges

[Bob Proulx]

Hi Arnold,

Aharon Robbins wrote:
> You are ssuming here that everyone uses GLIBC.

I don't know so I will ask.  Isn't the problem endemic to glibc?  Do
other libc's such as HP-UX or AIX or other have this same issue?  I am
out of touch on the details of them these days.

> Not so.  The projects that are dong something about it* will have to
> maintain their own code anyway.  (More's the pity.)

As you say, what a pity.  But in spite of the effort I hope they all
do the rational range intperpretation anyway.  It would be so much
better for users.

However it does mean that some programs will work as expected and some
won't.  There will still be differences and those will be confusing.

> * I take credit here, having started it in gawk and pushed grep into it :-)
> I think sed will eventually pick it up, and bash too. Karl Berry coined
> the lovely phrase "Rational Range Interpretation".  The campaign for Rational
> Ragne Interpretation is in full swing! :-)

I knew you were involved but I didn't remember the details and so not
wanting to slight someone just referred to it in the abstract.  Chet
of course had the detail and pointed a reference.  I am very happy to
see things progress in that direction.  Thanks!

Bob