&gt; it&#x27;s a programming language in the same way that a flashing light can be a programming language. If someone on the other side is using it to make decisions then you&#x27;re technically programming something so it&#x27;s a &quot;programming&quot; language.<p>You&#x27;re totally missing my point. A regular expression describes a <i>computation</i> - the series of state transitions a nondeterministic finite state automaton undergoes in order to decide whether an input string belongs to a language. (The fact that this computation is typically optimized by regex compilers is another matter.)<p>A programming language doesn&#x27;t need to be general-purpose to be a programming language.<p>&gt; The interesting thing about regexp is that it&#x27;s really damned close to the mathematical notations used for describing regular grammars, and therefore it&#x27;s a good, tight way to specify pattern matches on regular grammars.<p>Are you saying that what matters most about a language is its surface syntax? Seriously? Wow.