"Regular expression" lost the sense of "strictly only regular languages" around the time that Perl crushed the world.
It's probably time to give up on that terminology nit-pick.
It's probably time to give up on that terminology nit-pick.
Many Perl coders are self-taught programmers with no CS background. If a man page calls something a regular expression, that is good enough for them.
Why drop to that level if you know better?
I don't want to appear "gratuitously ignorant" in front of someone who might be a decent computer scientist.
There are already ways in which I will appear ignorant due to actual ignorance; why go out of my way to dumb down the way I speak about something that I do understand?
If we are going to wreck math terminology why don't we just redefine "prime number". Let's see: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, oh ... so 9 is prime 11, is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is prime ... And, what do you know: now we can use a regular regular regex for primality testing over the binary representation: why, it's just (0|1)*1. As a bonus, we can restore 1 to its proper status as a prime number and kick out the oddball 2.
Say, if Perl called an odd test function "isprime", would you start calling odd numbers prime?
Someone who is a decent computer scientist will be unlikely to care whether you say "regular expression" or "look how smart I am, I know to say that this thing Perl does is called regular expressions by ignorant plebes even though it strictly isn't, let's high-five!"
Because, y'know, someone who's actually a decent computer scientist probably has more important things to care about.
Maybe one thing like this doesn't matter, but if you make a habit out of sloppy use of technical terms, it will not go unnoticed.
Analogy: one neuron firing might not exceed a threshold, but thirty seven of them might.
> "look how smart I am, I know to say that this thing Perl does is called regular expressions by ignorant plebes even though it strictly isn't, let's high-five!"
That's rather verbose, making the cheesy scare quotes finger gesture an appealing alternative.
Your turn.
Perl standardized a good enough regular expression dialect that everyone else copied it. But the divergence between "regular expression" and "strictly only regular languages" was already a lost cause.