retro html formatted by nom
comments/suggestions to: mjb <at> nomlang.org
This could be the shortest document here: There are no regular expressions in the nom language and the pep virtual machine . This may seems a strange and self-defeating design decision, but I believe it is not.
Most parser generators (such as ANTLR ) include support for regular expressions during the lexical analysis phase of the parsing and compiling process. Surprisingly regular expressions do not seem necessary for most parsing applications, although sometimes their absence makes the grammar more complex.
The lack of regular expression support in the “lexing” phase of the nom script means that the implementation of pep and nom is considerably simpler than other tools