so apparently python's standard re module doesn't do recursive regular expressions

Irenes (many)

so apparently python's standard re module doesn't do recursive regular expressions

this is surely the correct decision and all. the life choices that led us to see that as the easiest solution to the problem we have in this moment are not necessarily good ones

kouhai, reliability officer

@ireneista oh no

Irenes (many)

@kouhai see, the existence of a recursion construct is a constraint on the possible backends, and therefore on performance

because it changes the class of languages it's possible to match from regular languages to context-free languages

Petra

@ireneista @kouhai what horror were you planning on unleashing?

Irenes (many)

@Petra @kouhai oh we just wanted to write a nice little regexp which will match arbitrary TeX expressions but with some specific constraints on the top-level command word

kouhai, reliability officer

@ireneista @Petra I think this might be possible in lua? (But I may be misremembering the brace-matching regex operator)

Irenes (many)

@kouhai @Petra the underlying PCRE library supports it, Python just chooses not to expose that functionality (wisely, in our view)

Erin 💽✨

@ireneista @kouhai @Petra I don't think python uses pcre