All true, and well-said, except that the precise commodity desired in this case is proof of the compatibility of two unprovable entities. My code neither knows nor cares what the two regexps "mean", or whether they correctly represent the author's intent; it only cares that output which satisfies the first regexp can be affirmatively stated to satisfy the second regexp.

In our particular instance, we're attempting to verify the correctness of a meta-application built of sequentially assembled functoids whose input and output contracts are specified as .xsd files. We don't want to know what any given functoid does, or what its parameters (or outputs) represent. We just want to verify that a given sequence of correct functoids is itself correct.

As a separate note, I'm really disinclined to accept Monte Carlo proofs in the hard sciences. I'll accept them in the soft sciences, but only because there aren't better alternatives. In programming in particular, there's almost always a formal proof of correctness available.

Thanks much,

Mickey.

In reply to Re^4: Comparative satisfiability of regexps. by Meowse
in thread Comparative satisfiability of regexps. by Meowse

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.