> ... comp.lang.emacs Wasn't the quote from comp.religion.emacs? But seriously, regular expressions are often ill-advised, as solutions based on them are freq

> ... comp.lang.emacs Wasn't the quote from comp.religion.emacs? But seriously, regular expressions are often ill-advised, as solutions based on them are frequently: - over-matching: they match things in cases where they shouldn't, because a situation wasn't anticipated by the developer - under-matching: not catching some input they should because a regular pattern was formulated to narrowly by the developer - matching the wrong thing altogether because they are hard to stay on top of, even when it's one you wrote - matching something, but you don't understand what and how it works, because regexes are "write only". There is even another case: - They work but they are the wrong instrument, because you try to model something that requires context-free generative capacity (e.g. syntax coloring) Interestingly, at Xerox Research Centre Europe (now Naver Labs) in Grenoble a much more elegant (more powerful yet more readable, and symmetric between inputs and outputs) has been developed as an alternative, mostly to write linguistic rules with it. For more info: * http://users.itk.ppke.hu/~sikbo/nytech/gyak/05_morfo/xfst/book.pdf_1.pdf http://users.itk.ppke.hu/~sikbo/nytech/gyak/05_morfo/xfst/bo... * https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo3613750.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo36... * There is an open-source implementation called FOMA: https://fomafst.github.io/ https://fomafst.github.io/