On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
DFAs parse regular languages, which means those languages can also be expressed as regexes. In fact, the regexes accepted by the preg_*() functions allow certain extensions to the language theory definition of regular expressions, allowing them to describe certain non-regular languages as well. In short: preg_split() can do everything a DFA can do, and more. The only reason to use a DFA parser would be performance, but since the preg_*() functions are so heavily optimized I don't think that'll be an issue.
This much I know, but is LaTeX actually a regular language?
On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Conrad Irwin conrad.irwin@googlemail.com wrote:
And here was me thinking that maintenance didn't happen because making changes to security critical sections of the code is dangerous :).
It's not security-critical. The worst you could possibly do is DoS, and any DoS could be instantly shut off by just turning off math briefly. Furthermore, the part that makes DoS impossible is a quite small portion of the code that would need to change effectively never. No, the problem is that most PHP programmers have never even heard of OCaml, let alone used it.