Python Programming

You might be wondering about the term ‘regular’. Here is a brief history lesson in case you are interested!

The term was coined by Mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene in a 1951 paper. Here, he tried to define a formal language for what he called “regular events”, in the context of artificial neurons (you know, the one in Neural Networks).

A regular language is the most restrictive class of formal grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy. The Chomsky hierarchy ranks different formal languages by their expressiveness, with “recursively enumerable” languages representing all formal languages that can be computed by a computer. There is a whole field called Theory of Computation dedicated to this topic if you are interested. It is in fact one of my personal favourite Theoretical Computer Science topics!