Programming challenge: wildcard exclusion in cartesian products

[funkyj]

Going in a slightly different direction ...

There has been lots of published work on how to create efficient FSMs
from regexps.  Generally these FSMs are used for pattern matching (i.e.
"does string 's' match regexp 'e'?").

Is there any corresponding literature on the topic addressed by the
OP's challenge of generating the languaged defined by a regexp (or the
complement of that regexp)?

  --jfc