I took this class for the Spring 2003 term. The course grade was based on a final exam and a paper. There was no mid-term and no homework assignments for grade. There were suggested problems and study groups, but none of the suggested problems were required. The instructor was Dr. Philip Dorin.
One of the more interesting finds while working on the paper was a graphical tool for building finite state machines with the capability of showing the same FSM as a regular expression. Alternately, the user begins with a regular expression and then has the tool generate the FSM. Dr. Dorin kept a copy of all papers. He returned all of the final exams.
This paper is a survey of some of the software implementations of Regular Expressions. Tools developed primarily for education or research are reviewed as well as several of the more popular engines in production use. The influence of POSIX standards will be addressed. It will be shown that many of the tools diverge from theory in order to bring greater utility and practicality to problem solving.
Last updated Saturday, April 26, 2014.