Regular expressions (regexes) are an amazingly powerful way to perform operations on collections of e.g. text. Regexss can also be considered to be a programming language, even a Turing complete one. Ergo it’s perfectly acceptable to thus design a way to use regexes to run and play a game of DOOM, as [Artem Lytkin] recently did.
The GitHub project page can be found here, containing the Python-based code that allows the demonstration to run, as well as the other components, including the C runtime and the 96.6 MB text string that defines a CPU’s registers, RAM, a framebuffer, the DOOM engine compiled to this custom CPU’s instruction set and the WAD file for the game itself.
The C-based driver applies the fixed, ordered list of find-and-replace rules to this string, which after more than ten-thousand of such substitutions later results in a single frame of the game. At about 80,000 substitutions per second on the given test system, that gets you to a sort-of playable framerate, even.
Naturally, the practical value of playing DOOM like this is pretty low, but as a demonstration of why regexes are awesome it’s hard to beat.
There’s nothing awesome about regex’s.
In years of software engineering our group always said there were 3 evils of computer science:
LDAP
Certificates
Regex’s
Why?
It is next to impossible to know what the coder intended scope of the regx to be.
The side effects and unintended security vulnerabilities are enormous. Let alone figuring how to change it without implementing weeks consuming unit tests.
My thoughts exactly