I wholeheartedly agree that the dry language of most finite automata papers would put anyone to sleep. It does serve an important purpose, namely making things precise enough to prove things mathematically. I certainly understand why you're falling asleep. Those papers are written for mathematicians, not programmers. ;-)

I think the fundamental problem is the disconnect you pointed out in your blog post: when you (and, it turns out, most programmers) say DFA and NFA you mean something related to but different from what the mathematicians mean. It is true that saying things about the programming concepts, which are fuzzy and implementation-specific, is not too worthwhile, since they are always shifting, but it's not true of the mathematical ideas, which have strong mathematical proofs associated with them, telling what one can and cannot do as far as implementation strategies and efficiency.

In reply to Re: Theory vs. Reality by rsc
in thread Perl regexp matching is slow?? by smahesh

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