Message from JavaScript discussions
August 2017
— Well that's interesting I guess, I just wonder why you'd need this
The thing is this also won't work on many regexes since modern regular expressions are not actually regular
— All regular expressions can be represented as a DFA, although the DFA can be extremely large
— Some regex with overlapping terminals may cause problems but it's just an extra case
— The hard part is writing the parser to turn the regex into DFA... but that itself can possibly be made out of a DFA too
— Well, if they are truly regular
— Like I said, what you call "regex" today is not necessarily regular anymore but can be context free or even context sensitive
— For example, using the results of captures inside of your match or using lookahead
— Dfa are context free
— All context free langs can be understood by automata
— Not afaik
— I wrote a compiler compiler in C++ that does it :P