Re:Advanced Regular Expressions
by DEinspanjer on Thursday May 07, 2009 @02:20PM
(#598402)
DFA vs NFA. I thought it was humorous that the most important features of modern regex engines are the things that prevent them from meeting the criteria of the original definition for a regex engine.
And of course, with a true DFA regex engine, you'll never suffer from catastrophic backtracking or exponential performance degradation with a bad regex or bad subject string.
Something which is ironic, and also gets back to basic CS concepts, is that modern scripting languages have added so much power to "Regular Expressions," that they are no longer strictly Regular Expressions. They are no longer equivalent to Finite Automata. "Regular Expressions" in many cases are outright Turing Complete.
And so the abuse of our field's terminology continues.