Our new regular expression module (`regexp2') is available for both
Allegro CL 6.2 and 7.0.beta. The goal was Perl compatibility and
speed. On the CL-PPCRE test suite, the execution time of ACL's
regexp2 is 30% faster than Perl 5.005, both on an x86 FreeBSD box.
The new module is available for all Allegro CL users, Trial included.
Just use sys:update-allegro to update their Lisp, which will include
the regexp2 module.
The documentation for the new (and old) module is here:
http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/6.2/doc/regexp.htm
And two introductory articles about it are here:
http://www.franz.com/support/tech_corner/#new-regexp-060704
http://www.franz.com/support/tech_corner/#regexp-update-072904
The second link above talks about the addition of some interesting
macros (re-let, re-lambda, and re-case).
The implementation was written by Shiro Kawai, with support from Steve
Haflich. Shiro used Steve's CL YACC (which will be released as a
patch in the near future for 6.2 and 7.0.beta). He gave a talk on the
new regexp module in Tokyo--the slides for the talk are here:
http://www.franz.com/support/tech_corner/shiro-re2-e.pdf (English)
http://www.franz.com/support/tech_corner/shiro-re2.pdf (Japanese)
I'm really quite impressed with the new implementation. I've been
using it for a few months and it's really a joy to use.