On Thu, 27 May 2004, skaller wrote:
> AFAIK: The C Pcre that it wraps does use global variables 
> and so while the interface appears re-entrant
> it isn't.

To prevent people from getting a false impression of PCRE as interfaced
to OCaml: it _is_ safe.  Calling PCRE-functions from threads or executing
two different regular expressions in an intermittent way should never
crash your program or lead to unexpected results.

The use of global variables by the C-library does not necessarily imply
that the program is unsafe.  It all depends on their use, and in this
case the global variables (e.g. pcre_callout) are initialized exactly
once at startup time, i.e. before the user can access any functions.

Libraries implemented in imperative style may still have reentrant
interfaces.

-- 
Markus Mottl          http://www.oefai.at/~markus          markus@oefai.at

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