Why isn't regular expressions part of ISO C99

Question

Everyone knows how awesome C language is and how much it sucks in text processing tasks. Given these facts. Regex definitely must be part of ISO C. But it isn't. I don't understand why? Are there people who think its not essential?

Answer 1

Regular Expressions don't belong in the C language proper any more than a sound library, a graphics library, or an encryption library does. Doing so would reduce the general purpose nature of the language and greatly inhibit its use as a small and efficient embedded language.

The philosophy of C was to have a very small and efficient language keyword set with standardized libraries for the next layer of functionality. Since things like regex, graphics, sound, encryption, etc. don't have a single platform or standard they don't fit in with the standard C library.

They fit best as user libraries which they currently are.

Answer 2

Regex is defined as part of IEEE Std 1003.1:2001 (POSIX)

Here's a handly list of which headers are in which standard:

http://www.schweikhardt.net/identifiers.html