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I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

What to Expect from Regular Expressions in JavaScript with ECMAScript 2018

Regular expressions have been supported in JavaScript since 1999 and ECMAScript 2015 added a few minor improvements such as RegExp.prototype.flags and RegExp.prototype.sticky. While JavaScript probably will never be thought of as the prototypical language for working with regular expressions, especially in an idiomatic way (that award still goes to Perl, after all ...), regular expression in JavaScript are quite usable and useful. In early 2017, V8 developer Mathias Bynen wrote about upcoming (proposed at the time) changes within ECMAScript 2018 that further improve ... Read more

Regular Languages Are … well … Regular

A few weeks ago I came across an article describing "A regular expression to check for prime numbers". I was intrigued because processes defined by formal regular languages have an inherently linear runtime while the process described is non-linear. This contradicts the definition of regular languages, specifically the Pumping Lemma. So, how is this even possible? Well, the regular expression discussed in this article and the regex framework it's used with makes clever use of backtracking for realizing this 'magic'. Quite simply, the ... Read more