Re: More Power to your Regex

This is very interesting indeed, but makes me wonder: why are we still calling such expressions regular? I cannot think of a good name for it, but surely "regular" does not describe it.

Can anybody think of some? (no cfgex for me --thank you very much :-)

Comment on Re: More Power to your Regex

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Re: Re: More Power to your Regex by robin (Chaplain) on Apr 02, 2002 at 08:49 UTC
I've been wondering the same thing. I expect Kleene is turning in his grave :-) We've had the same problem ever since back referencing was invented, really. The computer scientist Alfred Aho (of dragon book fame) wrote an article in 1990 in which he tried to introduce the term rewbr for "regular expression with back referencing". Oddly, it doesn't seem to have caught on... Maybe we should just call them all patterns and be done with it. Or else stick with regex, and forget that it was ever an abbreviation,	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: More Power to your Regex by demerphq (Chancellor) on Apr 02, 2002 at 10:08 UTC
Or else stick with regex, and forget that it was ever an abbreviation, Grin All we have to do is pretend that regular refers to how often we use them than to their underlying mathematical properties... Yves / DeMerphq --- Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.	[reply]