> it's a programming language in the same way that a flashing light can be a programming language. If someone on the other side is using it to make decisions then you're technically programming something so it's a "programming" language.
You're totally missing my point. A regular expression describes a computation - the series of state transitions a nondeterministic finite state automaton undergoes in order to decide whether an input string belongs to a language. (The fact that this computation is typically optimized by regex compilers is another matter.)
A programming language doesn't need to be general-purpose to be a programming language.
> The interesting thing about regexp is that it's really damned close to the mathematical notations used for describing regular grammars, and therefore it's a good, tight way to specify pattern matches on regular grammars.
Are you saying that what matters most about a language is its surface syntax? Seriously? Wow.
You're totally missing my point. A regular expression describes a computation - the series of state transitions a nondeterministic finite state automaton undergoes in order to decide whether an input string belongs to a language. (The fact that this computation is typically optimized by regex compilers is another matter.)
A programming language doesn't need to be general-purpose to be a programming language.
> The interesting thing about regexp is that it's really damned close to the mathematical notations used for describing regular grammars, and therefore it's a good, tight way to specify pattern matches on regular grammars.
Are you saying that what matters most about a language is its surface syntax? Seriously? Wow.