Any context-free language over a single-character alphabet is also regular (which can be shown using, for example, Parikh's theorem). So since this "language of exponentials" is non-regular, it is also non-context-free. Another way to look at it is that the pumping lemma for CFLs essentially collapses into the pumping lemma for regular languages when applied to single-character alphabets, because the concatenation operator is commutative on strings over a single-character alphabet.
I do stand by my intuition that backrefs alone (i.e., classical regexes + backrefs) won't help. But you are right, I am not able to prove it -- there is just no formal model that I'm aware of that exactly captures the expressivity of those operations, that would be amenable to impossibility proofs. I admit I hadn't thought of the new named captures & rules from 5.10 (I'm a bit behind the times). Clearly the named captures alone won't get you the regex desired in this case, but maybe some clever combination of both named rules & backrefs? I remain slightly skeptical but open-minded ;)
Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
Please read these before you post! —
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
- a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
| |
For: |
|
Use: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.
|
|
