[bazoom42]

Surely complexity is a factor? A procedual implementation will necessarily have the same essential complexity as the regex it replaces, but then it will additionally have a bunch of incidental complexity in matching and looping and backtracking.

Regexes can certainly be hard to read - the solution is to use formatting and comments to make them easier to understand - not to drown the logic in reams of boilerplate code.

[kelafoja]

> A procedual implementation will necessarily have the same essential complexity as the regex it replaces

I don't think I fully agree with this, and I don't see a basis for why this should be true. If I have a very specific implementation, it could have very little incidental complexity, it could be fully targeted to the use case. Whereas with regular expressions there is incidental complexity of the regex engine itself by definition.

[bazoom42]

Complexity in the standard library is not that relevant. If you make your own custom dictionary implementation, you increase complexity of your code base compared to just using the one in the standard library, even if your own implementaion is simpler.

The relevant complexity for using a regex is the complexity of the pattern itself and the complexity of invoking the regex. Any custom procedural solution will be more complex unless it is literally something as simple as checking whether a string contain a given literal string.

[rerdavies]

For some arbitrary definition of complex.