begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 09:36:16AM -0700: > On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 08:36:28PM -0700, Stewart Stremler wrote: [snip] > > Regular expressions (and finite state machines, formal languages, etc.) > > are _hard_ for some people. And tricky for the rest. > > Get the Owl book. Make it a part of your life. It's worth it.
Is that "Mastering Regular Expressions" or something? /me checks Yup. I've looked at that, but never found enough in it to make it worthwhile to actually *pay* for the book. Most of the advanced features in most regex languages are incompatible with the advanced features in *other* regex languages, but nearly all of 'em have at least dot, start, plus, question, brackets, brackets with caret, caret, and dollar-sign (and if you're lucky, parens do grouping). It's not the memorization that folks have a problem with. It's the concepts. But then, to me, regex are just a compact form of a DFA. > Lan "before the Owl book, perl looked like line noise" Barnes Heh. I found that taking a formal languages course resulted in sendmail.cf making sense; worse, not just sense, but it was *obvious*. -Stewart "By diligent use of alcohol I've finally killed those neurons" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
