My point is more that ‘regular’ languages form a core to the edifice because the edifice was built on it, and tailored to it. So it is circular to point to the edifice as their justification—doubtless a lot of those definitions and closure properties were carefully tailored to ‘bar monsters’, as Lakatos put it, and allow only those regular languages (in part because automata theory was such a huge industry in early CS, approaching a cult with the Chomskyites). And it should be no surprise if there’s a lot of related work building on it: if regexps weren’t useful and hadn’t been built on extensively, I probably wouldn’t be looking into the etymology 73 years later.
My point is more that ‘regular’ languages form a core to the edifice because the edifice was built on it, and tailored to it
If that was the point of the edifice, it failed successfully, because those closure properties made me notice that visibly pushdown languages are nicer than context-free languages, but still allow matching parentheses and are arguably what regexp should have been built upon.
My point is more that ‘regular’ languages form a core to the edifice because the edifice was built on it, and tailored to it. So it is circular to point to the edifice as their justification—doubtless a lot of those definitions and closure properties were carefully tailored to ‘bar monsters’, as Lakatos put it, and allow only those regular languages (in part because automata theory was such a huge industry in early CS, approaching a cult with the Chomskyites). And it should be no surprise if there’s a lot of related work building on it: if regexps weren’t useful and hadn’t been built on extensively, I probably wouldn’t be looking into the etymology 73 years later.
If that was the point of the edifice, it failed successfully, because those closure properties made me notice that visibly pushdown languages are nicer than context-free languages, but still allow matching parentheses and are arguably what regexp should have been built upon.