Improving std.regex(p)

[Ben Hanson]

== Quote from Nick Sabalausky (a at a.a)'s article
> "Ben Hanson" <Ben.Hanson at tfbplc.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:hvj9i1$1q7b$1 at digitalmars.com...
> > Lua has an interesting pattern matcher, as it goes more in
> > the formal grammar direction to (for example) match balanced parenthesis
> > etc.
> That's cool. That's something I've often wanted in regexes (It would be
> great for defining lever tokens in a grammar-definition language), and
> though I'm no FSA or regex expert, it always seemed like something entirely
> doable without having to resort to a full-blown LL or LR parser.

Yeah, it does seem obvious that there'd be some middle ground between regexes -
certainly the author of the LUA pattern matching thought so! :-) The topic could
definitely do with more attention.

There is limited back-tracking in the LUA pattern matching, which I don't like,
but it appears more efficient than back-tracking NFA.  Apparantly it has some
solid theory behind it too, which is good. Sadly just not enough time to persue
all these possibilities...

Regards,

Ben