If it's using classical regex, without backtracking or other extensions, a regular expression is isomorphic to a state machine. You can enumerate combinations doing something like this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1248566
kids these days and their lack of exposure to finite automata
- How so? I don't think it's possible to test for all cases...
- Well, it's easy, assuming a car on a non-branching track, moving with a constant speed and without any realistic external influences on it, you can simply calculate the distance traveled using the formula s = v/t. Ah, I wish I'd stop running into fools not knowing Newton's first law of motion...
I understand you want to refute/diminish the parent comment on finite automata, but I think you are providing a straw man argument. The parent comment does provide an interesting, factual statement. I don't believe finite state automata are at all close in complexity to real-world self-driving car systems (or even a portion thereof). Your closing statement is also dismissive and unconstructive.
I believe finite state modeling is used at NASA, A google search brings up a few references (that I'm probably not qualified to speak to), and I also remember hearing/reading a lecture on how they use them to make completely verifiable programs but can't find the exact one at the moment.
I wasn't making a strawman, I was making a parody of his strawman. I thought it's obvious, since I was making an analogy, and it was an analogy to his argument.
Well regex isn't Turing-complete, so it's not exactly an analysis of a program. You could reason about regex, about tokens, then describe them in a way that satisfies the specification, but theorizing like this is exactly opposite to "simple" - it would be so much harder than just learning regex. So stating that testing regex is simple is just bs. The author later confirms he is a bullshitter by his follow-up...
Bad developers do bad regexes, regardless of whether they used AI.