4 ms·

I always thought a hilarious interview question was, "what's regular about a regular expression?" Similar to, "What's Cascading about Cascading Style Sheets?"

• betenoire 10y ago
  I know the answers to those questions... but don't get the joke... What's the joke?
  • kmill 10y ago
    What is your answer to the first question? In Kleene's original paper (which I've only skimmed), he is interested in "events" for nerve computation models, and defines "regular events" to be some minimal set of events which is closed under concatenation, alternation, and star. He admits "regular" should be replaced by a better word --- this never happened. http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/1771/why-is-a-regular-language-called-regular http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/1771/why-is-a-regular-... If I were to make up history, I would say "oh, regular refers to finite state machines, so a regular language is a language recognizable by a finite state machine," but it appears my made-up history does not exactly match reality. This is not too far off, though, since in the paper he shows that regular events are exactly the kinds of events his nerve networks recognize, and there appears to be something about finite automata in the last section. They could have been called "rational languages" instead, because of a connection with rational functions. In fact, there are manipulations of rational series in Kleene's paper to prove some things about the languages. (I don't get the joke myself --- unless the joke is that you can't take the "regular" out of "regular language.")
    • betenoire 10y ago
      I share your understanding, and yeah, the joke is probably that the word "regular" sounds "easy" or "normal" (shit another loaded term). I was just curious if I was missing more