at this time, SRE uses types instead of classes for compiled patterns and matches. these classes provide a documented interface, and a bunch of internal attributes, for example: RegexObjects: code -- a PCRE code object pattern -- the source pattern groupindex -- maps group names to group indices MatchObjects: regs -- same as match.span()? groupindex -- as above re -- the pattern object used for this match string -- the target string used for this match the problem is that some other modules use these attributes directly. for example, xmllib.py uses the pattern attribute, and other code I've seen uses regs to speed things up. in SRE, I would like to get rid of all these (except possibly for the match.string attribute). opinions? </F>