[NTG-context] Off-topic: Struggles with LPEG grammar

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

Thanks to both Taco and Arthur for clarifying this and pointing out
the difference between PEG and PCRE.

I'll put some links like
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Compatible_Regular_Expressions
on my reading list and try to understand it more thoroughly than I do
at the moment.
After that I'll probably need to re-read Taco's answer a couple more
times, and probably write some parsing grammar as an exercise, but
I'll eventually get there :)

Just a correction of my previous statement. The following doesn't
really work either:
    lpeg.P('b') + lpeg.P('bb') + lpeg.P('bbb')
it just happened to work in one particular case on my minimal example,
but it doesn't help in general.
That's probably expected based on what Arthur and Taco explained to me.

> In your example, the fact that you even considered ^1 means that you were still thinking too much in terms of regular expressions,

In reality it just means that I was trying to add a new rule to solve
the second part of the puzzle (hidden on the website until you solve
the first part), which read something like
    6: 3 | 3 6
which would in theory be translated into something like
    r6 = lpeg.V"r3" + lpeg.V"r3" * lpeg.V"r6",
if PEGs worked the way I imagined they worked, that is. Apparently they don't :)

It seemed so obvious, but it would be too easy if it was true ;),
so it will force me to solve it "ab initio" (as it was initially meant) anyway.

Thanks a lot to everyone for the extra patience to explain me those
basic principles & differences,
    Mojca