The regular expression example makes no sense for me. A regexp is a very specialized way of express what a pattern must match, opossed to a java code that expre

The regular expression example makes no sense for me. A regexp is a very specialized way of express what a pattern must match, opossed to a java code that express how to perform the matching. You don't regexp's compact syntax. That's fine. You would have a point if you say that its more readable, let's say: 1: EXACT <a>(3) 3: PLUS(15) 4: ANYOF[ab](0) 15: OPEN1(17) 17: EXACT <cd>(19) 19: CURLY {0,1}(23) 21: EXACT <s>(0) 23: CLOSE1(25) 25: END(0) than /a[ab]+(cds?)/ but it's much easier to introduce a bug in 20 lines of Java code that deals with an ad-hoc parsing than in a regexp, specially if you have to change the pattern.