Re: back translating regular expressions

". . . and then I fed it 'a.*b' and my computer just locked up." See also "Halting Problem, The". :)

Having said that, if you can wait a few more weeks until Higher Order Perl (ISBN 1558607013) comes out I believe one of the stream generator examples is generating possible matches for a regex. That lets you generate matches one at a time in a manner where you can stop at any time.

Comment on Re: back translating regular expressions

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Re^2: back translating regular expressions by blokhead (Monsignor) on Mar 03, 2005 at 05:27 UTC
What on earth does that have to do with the halting problem? A computer going into an infinite loop is not the halting problem. If you meant that you can't tell whether a regular-expression denotes an infinite language, that's not quite right either. It's infinite if and only if it contains an infinite quantifier (+, *, {m,}), which is an easy property to check. blokhead	[reply]
Re^3: back translating regular expressions by Anonymous Monk on Mar 03, 2005 at 10:05 UTC
`/a/` [download] does not contain a quantifier, but there are an infinite amount of strings it will match. And if you only want to consider anchored strings: `my $q1; $q1 = qr /a(??{$q1})?/; my $q2 = qr /^$q1$/;` [download] matches all strings containing nothing but a's. But it doesn't use any of the quantifiers you mentioned. Also, `/^(?!)$/` [download] contains a `` quantifier, but it doesn't actually match any string. Perhaps you want to discount lookahead. Then I give you: `/^(\|)$/` [download] It'll give a warning, but all it matches is the empty string. But it does have a `` quantifier.	[reply] [d/l] [select]