Regular expressions

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

On Wednesday, November 4, 2015 at 1:52:31 AM UTC-7, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 November 2015 18:21, Christian Gollwitzer wrote:
> 
> > What rurpy meant, was that regexes can surface to a computer user
> > earlier than variables and branches; a user who does not go into the
> > depth to actually program the machine, might still encounter them in a
> > text editor or database engine. Even some web forms allow some limited
> > form, like e.g. the DVD rental here or Google.
> [...]
> What *I* think that Rurpy means is that one can construct a mathematical 
> system based on pattern matching which is Turing complete, and therefore in 
> principle any problem you can solve using a program written in (say) Python, 
> C, Lisp, Smalltalk, etc, or execute on a CPU (or simulate in your head!) 
> could be written as a sufficiently complex regular expression.

No, Christian was correct.