Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast. ⇒
13 February 2007, lunch time
An interesting article on modern day regular expressions, how they differ from the finite automata based expressions they are derived from, and what can be done to make regular expression engines consistently fast. The regular expressions you use in a language like Perl can be used to describe languages that aren't regular, hence they aren't really regular expressions in the classical sense. This is really unimportant: the additions to the syntax for moder day regular expressions are quite useful, which is why the modern day syntax is popular. I'm pretty sure most new operators can be neatly mapped back to the classical syntax without drastically increasing the length of the regular expression. This link was found via Daring Fireball.
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