boost for

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hello i'm one of the seven (7) people in the world who apparently enjoys writing regular expressions enough to shitpost about it

@CobaltVelvet
I enjoy writing regex engines, does that count?

@kellerfuchs @CobaltVelvet I enjoy complaining about how much better regular expressions could be if they were composable, ie http://synthcode.com/scheme/irregex/ (see also http://www.more-magic.net/posts/lispy-dsl-sre.html and for why regexes aren't composable (read "stringly typed systems") see http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/psets/ps01/ )

@cwebber @kellerfuchs @CobaltVelvet Shout-out to probably my favorite published paper ever, "A Play on Regular Expressions": https://sebfisch.github.io/haskell-regexp/

I used that library once to crack the cipher state of badly-encrypted files where the plaintext had a nice regular structure. Each observed byte constrained the possible cipher states a little more, in ways that fit the semiring construction nicely.

@jamey @kellerfuchs @CobaltVelvet holy shit this post has everything

@cwebber @jamey @kellerfuchs @CobaltVelvet kinda sorta related:
thoughts on this?
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/

@grainloom @jamey @kellerfuchs @CobaltVelvet Don't know anything about that one but skimming the first page I think I'd say "yeah there should be no reason regexps are so line focused"
and then
"there should be no reason all our unix tooling should be line-focused"
and then
"imagine an alternate future where git merge operated on the AST level rather than on the line level"