quote:
But it doesn't really have a large vocabulary. Well, not sure how you're defining vocabulary, but there's really only four or five types of things - quantifiers, character classes, positions, groups, and alternation, and none of those have more than a handful of variants.
Yeah, that's grammar/syntax which I agree is pretty neat.
The vocabulary isn't that large but it's quite large and that combined with its arbitrariness (i.e. everything is one character, so can't be differentiated/remembered that way and the characters often don't obviously relate to their subjects and so on - makes memorising hard) which makes it difficult.
And it genuinely
is complex when you get into back/forward references and have to worry about greediness and that kinda stuff. That's a genuine headfuck.
EDITED: 31 Oct 2011 15:24 by X3N0PH0N