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Re: Ruminating RFC 93- alphabet-blind pattern matching

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From:
Austin Hastings
Date:
April 3, 2003 07:29
Subject:
Re: Ruminating RFC 93- alphabet-blind pattern matching
Message ID:
20030403152937.5129.qmail@web12308.mail.yahoo.com
--- Edward Peschko <esp5@mdssirds.comp.pge.com> wrote:
> > What I think you're looking for is the fact that they're not
> regexes any more. They are > "rexen", but in
> horrifying-secret-reality, what has happened is that Larry's decided
> > to move Fortran out of core, and replace it with yacc.
> 
> just an aside, and a bit off-topic, but has anybody considered
> hijacking the regular 
> expression engine in perl6 and turning it into its opposite, namely
> making *productions*
> of strings/sounds/whatever that could possibly match the regular
> expression? ie:
> 
> a*
> 
> producing
> 
> ''
> a
> aa
> aaa
> aaaa
> 
> etc.
> 

This has been alluded to before.

What would /A*B*/ produce?

Because if you were just processing the rex, I think you'd have to
finish generating all possibilities of A* before you began iterating
over B*...

=Austin

> I could think of lots of uses for this:
> 
> 	1) test data for databases and programs.
> 	2) input for genetic algorithms/code generators
> 	3) semantic rules/production of random sentences.
> 
> In fact, I foresee a combo of 2,3 and some expert system somewhere
> producing the first 
> sentient perl program. ;-)
> 
> Ed
> 
> (
> ps: As for the 'rexen' concept of matching stuff other than
> characters, hell, that's a 
> *wonderful* idea. And if you turned the regex around so that you
> could (in a meaningful 
> way) make productions from it for stuff other than characters, you
> could make random 
> http requests, music, GUI requests/interactions database connections
> and so forth. 
> 
> Its a code testers' dream...
> 
> Now, just got to think of the syntax for it.. how to make it usable.
> )


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