So far, these are humble beginnings indeed. Based on the descriptions of
http://swtch.com/%7Ersc/regexp/regexp2.html
I started implementing a Thompson NFA / Pike VM.
The idea being that eventually, regular expressions are to be compiled
into special-purpose bytecode for the Pike VM that executes a varying
number of threads in lock-step over each character of the text to match.
The thread count is bounded by the length of the program: two different
threads with identical instruction pointer at the same character-to-match
would yield exactly the same outcome (and therefore, we can execute just
one such thread instead of possibly many).
To allow for matching groups, each thread carries a state with it, saving
the group offsets acquired so far.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
This makes both the Pattern and the Matcher class abstract so that more
specialized patterns than the trivial patterns we support so far can be
implemented as convenient subclasses of the respective abstract base
classes.
To ease development, we work on copies in test/regex/ in the 'regex'
package. That way, it can be developed in Eclipse (because it does not
interfere with Oracle JRE's java.util.regex.* classes).
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
