I’ve been thinking recently about the naming conventions I use while coding, and I noticed I tend to follow pretty strict naming standards so I don’t have to put much thought into picking a name. While standards are usually good for readability, too many...
So in part 1, we talked about different ways to represent languages in general, and in part 2, we talked about what a regular language is and how to use regular expressions to describe a regular language. Now I want to introduce another way to visualize a regular...
We recently received a ticket for a project requesting phone number validation in some forms. Seems like a simple enough problem to solve, right? Well, it’s not. Even with existing libraries that claim to handle phone validation, the more general the validation...
So we’ve discussed what a language is from a computer science theory viewpoint in part 1 of this series, and we have 2 ways of representing languages: Set notation: {λ, a, aa, aaa, …} or {a^n | 0 <= n} for short, and grammar production rules: {S ->...
Most programmers have used, or are at least aware of, regular expressions and how they work. But, fundamentally, what is a regular expression? Well, to understand that, we’ll have to understand a few core concepts. First, we need to know what an alphabet is....
