When Chomsky Met JavaScript: Exploring the Linguistics(...)
summary
History traces regular expressions from Chomsky’s grammars to JavaScript and claims that the key design choice is the forgetfulness of regular grammars which makes regexes ideal for piecewise pattern matching. Concrete examples show 01 and call(ing|s|ed) plus an anecdote about Kafkes/Kafkis spelling. JavaScript additions are explicit: back references break regularity and cost performance and quantifiers (star, plus, question) control greediness, with a live “Ha(\\1)” example demonstrating repeated-substring matching.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:29Regular Expressions
- 2:13The Chomsky Hierarchy
- 3:43Parseltongue
- 5:37Regular grammar
- 7:56Regular expressions in programming
- 11:31Regular expressions in JavaScript
- 12:16Back references in JavaScript
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