Ben Doom wrote:
>>>>2) Have a good reference for the implementation you're using handy. If you
>>>>meet somebody that claims the ability to do complex RegEx with no reference
>>>>they're either lying or mutants (or Mike D). ;^)
>>
>>Ah, but a regex with references (in the search string) is not a regex
>>(that is, a type-3 language on Chomsky's hierarchy[1]), but what I like
>>to call an Irregular Expression (or irregex, for short), which is a
>>lower type language masquarading as a type-3 one.
>
> You may be making a joke I just didn't quite get, but on the off chance
> you're not, let me say this:
>
> By "reference" he pretty much meant "book".
I was making a ha-ha-only-serious joke. I was also playing off the
ambiguity of "reference". It could refer to reference material (making
me a mutant, seeing as I've been frobbing data with regexes for long
enough now ('twas 10 years ago I first encountered Perl and awk) in
different languages over the years to know all but the darker corners of
the various implementations I've used over the years by heart), or to
backreferences (though most refer to them as just "references") in the
pattern a-la Perl-inspired regex engines. Regexes that contain
backreferences aren't regexes at all because they can't be modelled as a
finite state automaton, ergo the "Irregular Expressions" quip.
By Dog, you've gone and made kill that joke with a dangerous exposition!
:-)
K.
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