"foo" is a string. It's also a regex that matches exactly the string "foo". Regarding Turing-completeness, the entire point is about the termination of algorit

"foo" is a string. It's also a regex that matches exactly the string "foo". Regarding Turing-completeness, the entire point is about the termination of algorithms that examine parsers, not the runtime of the parsers themselves. I also don't know how many times I need to point out that the reason I'm focusing on regexes is that that was the context for this conversation. Under any other context I'm quite interested in new parsing techniques. Lastly, I would point out that regexes have uses far beyond a certain arbitrarily decided set of sysadmins and developers "worth their salt". Even if it's true that a meaningful subset of sysadmins are capable of writing basically sound BNF (which is not something I would count on even for CS grads, but maybe you work with smarter people than I do), there are lots of other people who could use a little more parsing power if it was offered in the right way.