I don't understand: "Standard lexing and parsing techniques are so easy to write so general, and so adaptable there's no reason to use regular expressions". Is

I don't understand: "Standard lexing and parsing techniques are so easy to write so general, and so adaptable there's no reason to use regular expressions". Isn't using the lex family of generators pretty 'standard' in terms of writing lexers? Aren't they generally considered fast and in most cases better than hand-written code? Aren't bad regular expressions just a consequence of someone not properly learning regular expressions? Couldn't the same argument be applied to every programming language? Also: http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html