The statement: "Switching to ASCII mode can improve performance in some implementations." made me wonder if the primary motivation for w/ascii was to improve performance.

On 10/17/2013 1:52 AM, Alex Shinn wrote:
On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Michael Montague <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
Why are w/ascii and w/unicode necessary? The ascii character set can be used instead.

(regexp-search `(: bos (* ,char-set:ascii) eos) "English") => #<rx-match>
(regexp-search `(: bos (* ,char-set:ascii) eos) "ÅëëçíéΓͺÞ") => #f

You seem to be misunderstanding these operators. Β They apply
to all contained patterns. Β The examples you are referring to
are operating on the "letter" character class. Β You could, if you
wanted, use intersection to restrict individual sets to ASCII-only:

(regexp-search `(: bos (* (& ascii letter)) eos) "English") => #<rx-match>
(regexp-search `(: bos (* (& ascii letter)) eos) "ÅëëçíéΓͺÞ") => #f
(regexp-search `(: bos (* letter) eos) "ÅëëçíéΓͺÞ") => #<rx-match>

However, this needs to be duplicated multiple times if there
are multiple nested csets, and is in fact impossible if the nested
cset is part of an external SRE, e.g. you can't do this here:

(import (only (mystuff regexp-common) rx:plurals))
(regexp-search `(w/ascii ,rx:plurals) "...")

--Β 
Alex