Regular Expressions vs. Regex: CS geekery
A few days ago in one of the online programming groups I'm in someone was asking for help with a regex. I recommended using a non-capturing group, since she had specific things she needed to return at the end. Usually when I use regexes I'm just checking for a match or not, so I've rarely bothered with capturing or not capturing, so I decided to read up a bit. Found this excellent resource , which I shall have to remember in future, and started browsing around it looking at the wealth of info on all aspects of regexes, when a thought occurred to me. Did we learn about this stuff in Automata, Languages, and Computability (AKA the mother of all theory classes in the CS masters degree, most of which I have forgotten)? Is that part of CS regular expressions, or strictly a programming language implementation regex thing? Where is the line for that, anyway? I started Googling, and turned up several excellent answers on the CS Stack Exchange, which I really ought to browse more...
