sed "RE too long"

[Martyn Johnson]

One of our "sed" scripts stopped working in Ultrix 3.0, with
"RE too long".

On investigation (we have source) I discovered that part of the internal 
representation of REs has doubled in size to allow for 8-bit characters, 
but the workspace arrays have not been correspondingly expanded.

So I fixed it locally; it took a few minutes.

I reported it to Digital via the DSIN, explaining both the symptom and 
the cause. I was expecting to hear that it would be corrected in "some 
future release".

Instead, they said that it was a "feature" of Ultrix 3.0, and I would 
just have to work around it.  In fact they said that RE's are limited
to "60 characters" - I believe this to be at the very least irrelevant,
since it is the COMPILED version of the RE which overflows, and this
depends more on its complexity than its length.

Is this support?

If anyone in Ultrix engineering is listening, how about just increasing
the array sizes so that it works as it did before?

Martyn Johnson      maj at cl.cam.ac.uk
University of Cambridge Computer Lab