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Re: State-of-the-art algorithms for lexical analysis?

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On Monday, June 6, 2022 at 8:06:28 AM UTC-7, Roger L Costello wrote:

(snip, I wrote)
> > I suspect that if regexes hadn't previously
> > been defined, we might come up with
> > something different today.

> Wow! That is a remarkable statement.

Well, mostly, regex were defined based on what was reasonable to do on
computers at the time. It seems reasonable, then, with the more powerful
computers of today, to expect that more features would have been added.

Some of that was done in the later ERE, Extended Regular Expression.

But there is a strong tendency not to break backward compatibility,
and so not add new features later.
[See my note about DFAs a few messages back. EREs are just syntactic
sugar on regular REs so sure. PCREs are swell but they are a lot
slower since backreferences mean you need to be able to back up.
-John]

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Re: State-of-the-art algorithms for lexical analysis? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2022-06-06 10:48 +0000
  Re: State-of-the-art algorithms for lexical analysis? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-06-06 10:03 -0700
  Re: State-of-the-art algorithms for lexical analysis? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-06-06 12:25 -0700

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