On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 at 11:29 -0600, Levi Pearson wrote: > Nicholas Leippe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> > >> For CS majors at BYU, regexps are part of the required CS 252. > >> > >> (That's what you get for studying CE. :) > > > > Ah. That explains it. Never had 252. But, I bought the O'Reilly book, and > > that has made all the difference. ;) > > Though, 252 teaches real regular expressions, which are far more > limited than your standard perl-compatible regexp library. Of course, > it also teaches you how to recognize a regular language and prove that > it is so. And it gives you an idea of why you might sometimes want to > use a regular language instead of a more powerful one.
And by limited of course you are talking about syntax. They are equal in what they can match (regular languages). I think everyone who enjoys regular expressions should also look into parsers and compilers, e.g. context-free grammars via recursive descent or lex/yacc. I read a blog entry by some bigwig once saying that compilers is the most important CS class, and while I'm not sure if it's the *most* important it is definitely very important. Overcoming the fear of building compilers (really, you can do it and with the right tools it doesn't take very long) can make a big positive difference in the problems you can tackle and how you tackle them. -- Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach
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