This sounds exactly like what I was hoping to learn more about. I wanted to create an IRC client where I would add/remove modules at runtime. These modules mi

This sounds exactly like what I was hoping to learn more about. I wanted to create an IRC client where I would add/remove modules at runtime. These modules might respond to things said in-chat. As an example, you might have a greeter module that responds to common things like "hi" and "hello". The module would register expressions for things it triggers on. In parallel, all these modules would have registered expressions. Instead of testing all these expressions in series, I wanted to feed these to some code that would decompose and reduce them into a simplified expression. It'd be like if you arranged the regexps in a nested series of if-conditions. Finding an appropriate middle ground for testing expensive regular expressions was the objective of all that, but I didn't get very far as I lost myself in Lua's LPeg project. What a beautiful goddamn project. So unique and amazing.