Regular Expressions Can Be Fun

   16 March 2010, early morning

Russel Cox, one of the men behind Google’s new programming language Go, has written a three part article on regular expressions. It’s a nice mix of computer science theory, programming, and history: Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach, and Regular Expression Matching in the Wild.

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Comments

  1. This probably coincides with their release of re2

    I read the first article cause the analysis was interesting but only glanced through the 2nd and 3rd articles.

    It’s so rare that I see people using backreferencing to it’s fullest degree though, if at all. Most people I know use regexps as just ‘fancy search’.

    by Iluvitar on Mar 16, 12:05   #

  2. In the last article he talks about how they didn’t bother supporting back references because they are hard to implement correctly and quickly, and because most people don’t really know how to use them. re2 sounds pretty bad ass.

    by ramanan on Mar 16, 12:15   #

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