Probably due to they're a great notation for the problem area which for regex is concisely describing text patterns.
For example 'a*b' is any number of 'a's followed by 'b'.
How else would you concisely state that?
For example 'a*b' is any number of 'a's followed by 'b'.
How else would you concisely state that?
Presumably people who hate array languages think all 3 character regexes should instead be big nested loops, so they are "readable".
When writing a program, I prefer to use a PEG, giving the less compact notation `'a'* 'b'` but also letting me say `'a'* b` and define b as its own rule, including recursion for the useful cases. It helps that it's more powerful, being little more than a formalization of the post-regular strategies used in Perl-style 'regular' expressions while embracing recursion.
For '/' in vim, grep, wherever? Yeah regex is fine, that's what it was designed for.
"a"* "b"
Could you explain this? I don't quite understand what the problem is. Do you mean something like sed's regex substitute command?
If you use syntax like "a"* "b" then it's really obvious - the stuff in quotes is literal text, everything else is control.
Lots of formats make the same mistake, e.g. YAML.