Have you seen that used for interviewing? Yes, some people can do it in a 1-hour interview, but wouldn't you rather ask something that can't be done from memory?
I know engineers who have asked it, yes. It really seems to be a test for "who was paying attention to that one lecture in CS205 near the end of the semester"
Wow. That's quite a tricky test, too -- if you study Thompson's original paper you can see plenty of pitfalls. E.g. his main code would loop forever on a star of a star, and he solves this in an appendix with a preprocessor to rewrite regexes of that kind, only it looked like that rewriting would blow up the size of the regex exponentially in the length of the stack of stars. No hire!
Comments
There's a common question, "convert an RE into an NFA" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson%27s_construction)
Have you seen that used for interviewing? Yes, some people can do it in a 1-hour interview, but wouldn't you rather ask something that can't be done from memory?
I know engineers who have asked it, yes. It really seems to be a test for "who was paying attention to that one lecture in CS205 near the end of the semester"
Wow. That's quite a tricky test, too -- if you study Thompson's original paper you can see plenty of pitfalls. E.g. his main code would loop forever on a star of a star, and he solves this in an appendix with a preprocessor to rewrite regexes of that kind, only it looked like that rewriting would blow up the size of the regex exponentially in the length of the stack of stars. No hire!
it doesn't any worse than what Huffman did for his CS classes at UCSC.