Talk:Regular language

I removed the following:

The word regular is used because these expressions are built up using very distinct limited and regulated syntax rules.

I think one could argue that context-free languages are also built according to limited syntax rules. I'm pretty sure the word "regular" was chosen without much thinking; it's one of those meaningless terms, like "normal", that are used all over the place. Also, the above "these expressions" seems to refer to regular expressions, but regular expressions hadn't been mentioned in the article at that point. --AxelBoldt

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A regular language is a formal language (i.e. a possibly infinite set of finite sequences of symbols from a finite alphabet) that has one of the following equivalent properties:

• (...)
• it can be described by a regular expression.

Modern "regular" expressions can describe more languages than just regular ones. Example: /([a-z]*)\\1/ (weird software problem - there should be 1 backslash there) --Taw