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A comment on Regular Expression That Checks If A Number Is Prime. Parent comment

Re:Regular Expression That Checks If A Number Is Prime by eponeponepon on Friday September 09, 2016 @12:57AM (#12459717)
No, but he probably does use layman's terms when describing molecular lattices and electron shells. If he ever does.

The point here is that users of (colloquial) regular expressions, however professional they are or aren't, are just engaging with the surface of a deeper set of mathematical principles that require greater nuances of meaning to discuss than their applications do.

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Re:Regular Expression That Checks If A Number Is Prime by OskarS on Friday September 09, 2016 @10:39AM (#12462637)
I basically agree, but I would say that a slightly deeper understanding of regular expressions is a really useful thing to know for basically all professional programmers. If for no other reason they can recognize the "pathological" cases where backtracking implementations (i.e. almost all modern regex implementations) would need until the heat death of the universe to evaluate.
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