On 12/11/2010 05:24 PM, Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Apparently you have a radically different idea of "ubiquitous" than I
>> do...
>
> Regular expressions are the same as state machines.

Sure. Just expressed in an unecessarily cryptic mannar.

If a state machine is a good way to solve your problem, why not express 
it clearly? And why limit it to only operating on characters?

> Let me list a few of the programs I use every day that support and use
> regular expressions:
>
> .NET
> VI
> EMacs
> Grep
> Find
> Bash
> Perl
> Awk
> Sed
> Flex

...so, basically Unix text-mangling tools then?

> javascript

That's the third time I've heard somebody say that. I've yet to see it.

> Pretty much every editor above the level of notepad

It's no secret that emacs and vi think this is a good idea. I don't 
recall seeing any other editors use it though.

> Pretty much every programming language since COBOL

Really. Because your list seems to include only low-level scripting 
languages. I don't see regexs in Pascal, C, Eiffel, etc.

> Let me list a few of the programs that support the parser you prefer:
>
> Haskell

I'm pretty sure that Haskell is not the only programming language that 
offers real parser construction tools. Parsec is merely an example of 
such. (If you /really/ want to split hairs, Parsec has actually been 
ported to [at least] Java, Ruby and C#. But that's not the point.)

> So, yeah, the fact that your education sucks doesn't mean bupkiss about
> what actually goes on in the real world. :-)

Right. Because Unix text-mangling is all that happens in "the real 
world", naturally...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
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