Much more useful to learn about constructing NFA/DFA automatons from 'pure' regular expressions, then say just knowing regular expression syntax off by art. Thi

Much more useful to learn about constructing NFA/DFA automatons from 'pure' regular expressions, then say just knowing regular expression syntax off by art. This is basically gets you to understand regular grammar, probably the easiest formal grammar to understand. If you understand state machines, you know what you know what regular grammars are capable of. Where all the different types of parsing methods? Recursive Descent, LL Parsers, LR Parsers, LALR parser. Being able to understand production rules? Chomsky hierarchy of the formal grammars? Then converting that into AST -> Optimization(so much stuff here) -> Code emitter.