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Re:A Course on Automata Theory by iso8859-1 on Thursday August 20, 2015 @06:41AM (#10090979)
One reason may be that practical regexes have so many extensions that you can't many of the usual tricks on them.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6363397/how-to-tell-if-on...

Re:A Course on Automata Theory by brudgers on Thursday August 20, 2015 @10:24AM (#10092010)
I find it helpful to distinguish between "regular expressions" as something mathematical and "regexes" as nebulous more-than an NFA and less than a Turing complete grammar...DFA regex engines being the Platypus that proves the rule.

As soon as you have backtracking and capture groups it's not a regular expression in the mathematical sense. These features make regexes more useful in many simple cases at the cost of making them harder to reason about in more difficult cases.