Language documentation ( was Re: Computing Industry shams)

[Sean Burke]

alex goldman <hello at spamm.er> writes:

> vermicule wrote:
> 
> > 
> > What is so hard to understand ?
> > Should be perfectly clear even to a first year undergraduate.
> > 
> > As for "greedy" even a minimal exposure to Djikstra's shortest path
> > algorithm would have made the concept intuitive. And from memory,
> > that is the sort of thing done in Computing 101 and in  Data Structures
> > and Algorithms 101
> > 
> > It seems to me that you want the Python doc to be written for morons.
> > And that is not a valid complaint.
> 
> He's right actually. If we understand the term "greedy" as it's used in
> graph search and optimization algorithms, Python's RE matching actually IS
> greedy.

No, you're just confused about the optimization metric.
In regexes, "greedy" match optimizes for the longest match,
not the fastest.

And this is common regex terminology - man perlre and you will
find discussion of "greedy" vs. "stingy" matching.

-SEan