Regular expressions

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wednesday 04 November 2015 11:33, rurpy at yahoo.com wrote:

>> Not quite.  Core language concepts like ifs, loops, functions,
>> variables, slicing, etc are the socket wrenches of the programmer's
>> toolbox.  Regexs are like an electric impact socket wrench.  You can do
>> the same work without it, but in many cases it's slower. But you have to
>> learn the other hand tools first in order to really use the electric
>> driver properly (understanding torques, direction of threads, etc), lest
>> you wonder why you're breaking off so many bolts with the torque of the
>> impact drive.
> 
> I consider regexs more fundemental

I'm sure that there are people who consider the International Space Station 
more fundamental than the lever, the wedge and the hammer, but they would be 
wrong too.

Given primitives for branching, loops and variables, you can build support 
for regexes. Given regexes, how would you build support for variables?

Of course, you could easily prove me wrong. All you would need to do to 
demonstrate that regexes are more fundamental than branching, loops and 
variables would be to demonstrate that the primitive operations available in 
commonly used CPUs are regular expressions, and that (for example) C's for 
loop and if...else are implemented in machine code as regular expressions, 
rather than the other way around.



-- 
Steve