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I'm curious to see what ends up in "21: Extensions To Avoid".

By the way, from a quick glance, I believe there is no chapter devoted to discuss how the regexp engines work (which is ok) but will there be a section on "when things explode in your face due to exponential behaviour"?

I remember when I first noticed a regex I wrote had a bewhaviour like that and it was kind of enlightening, because earlier I had always assumed all the talk about this things was rather academic :)



Yeah, so I thought about making the 2nd half a walk through building a regex engine by first building a lexer, then a parser, then the engine, but I wasn't sure if that'd work to teach regular expression. I think it'd be a great way to really understand how they work (it's how I figured them out), but I'm not sure if other folks would get the same understanding out of it.


I think this would be awesome. The mini database and the simple object system were really interesting exercises in Learn C the Hard Way and this would be another great exercise/project for one of your books.


Along these lines are there any plans for "learn compilers the hard way" ? Missed that big time in school.




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