RE: Newbie question list: Was The perverse vibe of lua-l

[Aaron Brown <arundelo@...>]

>> And I'm not talking a minor technicality here, but the
>> fundamental fact that regular expressions involve
>> recursively defining expressions; there's none of that in
>> Lua pattern matching.
 
> The conventional/traditional meaning of the term "regular
> expression" most certainly does not require recursion.
> Indeed, it's precisely the _lack_ of recursion that is
> often used to differentiate between REs and more powerful
> types of grammars.

Tim means that regular expressions can do stuff like

  (foo)*

and

  ((foo)*(bar)*)*

whereas in Lua patterns operators like "*" cannot apply to
parenthesized subgroups.

-- 
Aaron
http://arundelo.com/