[avinash]

Aha. I wrote this post 15 years ago after explaining to my wife (who is a Language major) how this "regular expression" works.

It has been discussed a few times on Hacker News, Reddit, etc. over the past 15 years...

[chx]

As an aside, a Hungarian mathematician wrote an entire book explaining how mathematics works to a, I guess, a language major (well, Marcell Benedek was a professor, a writer, a literary historian, a translator, a theatre director).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_with_Infinity

[bmn__]

Credit is due to Abigail <https://web.archive.org/web/2020/http://www.abigail.be/>. Please give it and be a good Internet citizen by amending the post.

[phgn]

@dang can we please add (2007) to the title?

[beardyw]

It doesn't seem to be past its "best before" date.

[phgn]

What do you mean? I actually love posts about old articles, they're often more useful than any fleeting news.