Re: say if grep can find non-ascii

[Paul Eggert]

Julian Foad <address@hidden> writes:

> Whether Grep should support that class unconditionally, as Perl does,
> is another matter.  I'd say probably not; there's probably a reason
> why it's not in the list of standard classes.

I suspect the reason is that 'isascii' wasn't put into the C standard,
due to concerns about porting programs to EBCDIC hosts.

Is 'grep' intended to be portable to EBCDIC hosts?  If so, then you
could print a diagnostic when the user attempts to use 'isascii' on an
EBCDIC host (which isn't very likely).  Otherwise there's no good
reason not to support isascii; it's a useful mnemonic, and is widely
supported and used in other environments.

> The Grep manual should be more explicit about the use of character
> classes other than those that it says are supported.

Agreed.