Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> It's not the concept of a regular expression as such. It's the fact that 
> all known implementations work by mixing up code and data in the same 
> encrypted string.

  I don't understand what you mean by that.

> OK, so it's convenient to be able to say "foo*bar" and mean "any string 
> that starts with 'foo' and ends with 'bar'".

  Actually it doesn't mean that.

> But by the time you've 
> added 25 different special characters with a dense set of possible means 
> such that you have an almost Turing-complete language, my reaction is 
> "for God's sake, stop trying to encode the entire language grammar into 
> a text string and go use a /real/ programming language!"

  Regular expressions define less than 10 special characters (vertical bar
signifying in practice a boolean 'or', parentheses for grouping, two
quantification symbols and one "wildcard" symbol). Extended regular
expressions add a few more (the '+' quantification symbol and []), but
the total still remains under 10.

  Regular expressions are nowhere near Turing strong. They are state
machines.

  I don't know what you are confusing regular expressions with, but they
are not that complicated.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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