== Quote from Nick Sabalausky (a...@a.a)'s article > "Ben Hanson" <ben.han...@tfbplc.co.uk> wrote in message > news:hvj9i1$1q7...@digitalmars.com... > > Lua has an interesting pattern matcher, as it goes more in > > the formal grammar direction to (for example) match balanced parenthesis > > etc. > That's cool. That's something I've often wanted in regexes (It would be > great for defining lever tokens in a grammar-definition language), and > though I'm no FSA or regex expert, it always seemed like something entirely > doable without having to resort to a full-blown LL or LR parser.
Yeah, it does seem obvious that there'd be some middle ground between regexes - certainly the author of the LUA pattern matching thought so! :-) The topic could definitely do with more attention. There is limited back-tracking in the LUA pattern matching, which I don't like, but it appears more efficient than back-tracking NFA. Apparantly it has some solid theory behind it too, which is good. Sadly just not enough time to persue all these possibilities... Regards, Ben
