3 ms·

How would you envision that working? What is the estimated distance function?

• DasIch 14y ago
  The "distance" of a regular expression could be the specifity (think CSS) or the size of the language described by the regular expression (with some adjustments to account for repetition as a* being infinite is probably not what is intended.) The real problem is that the space of possible solutions is very large, so you will have to do that lazily, which would make an implementation in a lot of languages rather annoying. I'd also expect this algorithm to be biased towards regular expressions that are more specific than the user intended them to be, especially for example sets that are small or not very diverse.
  • __alexs 14y ago
    Is a* more or less infinite than .*?
    • krallja 14y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm
      • __alexs 14y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
    • DasIch 14y ago
      I intended `a` to mean `a` repeated zero or more times, meaning that `a` defines a language of infinite size as there are an infinite number of strings that match that grammar.