Pattern(ID:3769/pat007)

PATTERN MATCHING

by Dmitry A. Kazakov

Pattern matching is a powerful tool for syntax analysis. The main idea of
pattern matching comes from the SNOBOL4 language 

(See wonderful book THE SNOBOL4 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE by R. E. Griswold, J.
F. Poage and I. P. Polonsky.)

Some of the pattern expression atoms and statements were taken from there.

One can find that patterns are very similar to the Backus-Naur forms.
Comparing with the regular expressions (used by grep and egrep in UNIX)
patterns are more powerful, but slower in matching.

The pattern matching library was developed by Dmitry A. Kazakov.