Comment by skrebbel
7 hours ago
You’re splitting hairs. The author is writing from the perspective of a PHP programmer (author is in fact a major PHP contributor), where the term “regex” has a single very clear definition, namely PHP’s PCRE-based implementation.
No, this is not splitting hairs. This is the author using the straight up wrong terminology. Regex can’t match HTML, and aren’t NP-complete. The fact that the author believes that “regex obviously means PCRE” is objectively wrong and misleading in the sense that all the things his article are about would have another conclusion if he actually talked about Regex.
It’s like if there was a library called QuickSort which also included a SAT solver and I then wrote an article about how you can solve SAT-equivalent problems with quicksort (“in the programmer sense, which obviously means a SAT solver”)
I already quoted from TFA in response to you, completely refuting your misrepresentation of it. To post this more than an hour after my comment while ignoring my comment is bad faith, especially this extraordinary falsehood and fake quote:
> the author believes that “regex obviously means PCRE”
The actual statement in TFA is
> (Reminder: When I say “regular expression” here I obviously mean it in the programmer sense, not the formal language theory sense.)
There are regex libraries that are more powerful than the regular expressions corresponding to Chomsky's regular languages. One can pedantically argue that these libraries are "using the straight up wrong terminology" by using such terms as "regex" or "regexp", but that ship has sailed, and the charge against TFA is bogus since it is very explicit about talking about those libraries and not the something from formal language theory, and it is very explicit about these regexes being able to parse CFGs and not just Chomsky's regular languages.
Finally, you're just plain wrong about "the straight up wrong terminology". The technical language theory terminology is "regular language", which has a formal definition and TFA is completely accurate in its discussion of that. But "regular expression" and "regex" has a broader and more casual meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Patterns_fo...
I won't respond further.