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Regular-expression derivatives re-examined

Part of: JFP Research Articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

SCOTT OWENS ,
JOHN REPPY  and
AARON TURON
SCOTT OWENS
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge (e-mail: Scott.Owens@cl.cam.ac.uk)
JOHN REPPY
Affiliation:
University of Chicago (e-mail: jhr@cs.uchicago.edu)
AARON TURON
Affiliation:
University of Chicago, Northeastern University (e-mail: turon@ccs.neu.edu)
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Abstract

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Regular-expression derivatives are an old, but elegant, technique for compiling regular expressions to deterministic finite-state machines. It easily supports extending the regular-expression operators with boolean operations, such as intersection and complement. Unfortunately, this technique has been lost in the sands of time and few computer scientists are aware of it. In this paper, we reexamine regular-expression derivatives and report on our experiences in the context of two different functional-language implementations. The basic implementation is simple and we show how to extend it to handle large character sets (e.g., Unicode). We also show that the derivatives approach leads to smaller state machines than the traditional algorithm given by McNaughton and Yamada.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Functional Programming , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , March 2009 , pp. 173 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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