[andyjohnson0]

You have a point, but it seems clear to me that your parent commenter was referring to more pervasive abstractions like frameworks and probably programming languages.

Unless you're coding in Perl or sed or whatever then regular expressions arent really a primary abstraction. And even when they are, I don't see how the implementation wouldn be accessible as a lower level. They're not really a layered abstraction.

[eru]

I am saying that regular expressions are an abstraction that has many different implementations. So there's no single underlying implementation you need to understand.

The only thing you need to watch out for is regular expression matchers that are prone to exponential blowup. But you don't need to understand anything; you can just consult a list of which ones are bad and which ones are good, and then avoid the bad ones; without any understanding of the mechanics necessary.

> You have a point, but it seems clear to me that your parent commenter was referring to more pervasive abstractions like frameworks and probably programming languages.

Probably. I was just looking for the simplest example that the maximum number of people would be familiar with.