[afn]

> (Just be careful, if your regular expression matcher uses backtracking, you might get pathological behaviour. Though memoisation makes that less likely to hit by accident in practice.)

Doesn’t that exactly demonstrate why using the tool effectively requires an understanding of the implementation (or possible implementations) behind the abstraction?

[eru]

Understanding is perhaps sufficient, but not necessary.

You can just consult a list that tells you which regular expression matchers to avoid (like eg Perl), and which ones are good (like grep), and you are good to go. No need to understand anything.

[Brian_K_White]

It does. Their argument is a farce. By now they've had many chances and made many attempts to illustrate their point if they had one. They don't have one, but they somehow don't know it. What can ya do?

[carlmr]

It does, and I had exactly that same reaction! Regexes are a leaky abstraction, like all of them.

[eru]

Understanding is perhaps sufficient, but not necessary.

You can just consult a list that tells you which regular expression matchers to avoid (like eg Perl), and which ones are good (like grep), and you are good to go. No need to understand anything.