Regular Languages

2016-06-27

Parsing is usually broken into two steps: converting a stream of characters into words, and then converting the stream of words into trees. The first step has several names, including lexing, scanning, and tokenizing. It is relatively easy to write a lexer using a simple finite state machine. These finite state machines correspond to a class of languages known as the regular languages.

Programmers often learn them because searching with regular expressions is much more effective than with simple text matching.

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