This is a Java library that handles regular expressions in a new way. The regular expression can be run on a large character string and it supports changes to the string without having to recompute the entire expression.
The supported changes to the string are concatenating two strings, or cutting a string into parts. This allows for adding/removing characters from a string.
Best use for this (imo) is in doing a regular expression over a large user entered document. As the user types, we can give regular expression updates in real time as we do not need to recompute everything.
Limits: "we only have character classes, braces and the operators +, *, ?, |", so only basic expressions.
Nice explanation. One more thing: this also leads to an algorithm for doing ordinary, non-incremental regular expression matching in O(lg n) time on a parallel machine. It uses a clever method which I think was first discovered on the old Connection Machines by Danny Hillis and Guy Steele:
