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There's probably an alternate timeline where we went down the SNOBOL road for pattern matching rather than going with regexes. I believe SNOBOL pattern matchin

There's probably an alternate timeline where we went down the SNOBOL road for pattern matching rather than going with regexes. I believe SNOBOL pattern matching is more powerful than classic regexes, though I don't know that holds for modern regex extensions.

Animats 3y ago
Definitely more powerful than regular expressions. Too powerful. You can easily write useful patterns in SNOBOL which generate exponential time searches, because search can back up and try a different route. Regular expressions are the linear-time subset of SNOBOL patterns.