Mastering Regular Expressions 2nd Ed.

[David LeBlanc]

> It's strange that while regular languages are a small subset of real,
> Turing-complete languages, it's very hard to read or write any
> non-trivial regexp. The syntax is straight out of computer science
> mathematical notation (with some extensions) and is not suitable for
> anything complex. It's bit like programming for the Turing machine. On
> the other hand, the syntax is compact and IS suitable for simple
> tasks.
<snip>

> Kristian Ovaska <kristian.ovaska at helsinki.fi>

I may be wrong about this, but I don't think regular expressions qualify as
turing complete. No branching for one thing...

Personally, I think RE's are great and ought to be fully integrated into
Python, along with a few improvements.

Dave LeBlanc
Seattle, WA USA