You are at least 20 years too late to change terminology here.  There are more people who are used to the wrong terminology than will ever hear or care about the official terminology.  Complaining about it is like telling the media the difference between crackers and hackers, or like telling most programmers that what they mean by big-O really is big-Omega.<p>The problem starts with &quot;regular expression&quot;.  Regular expressions in Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, Ruby, or many other languages or environments, aren&#x27;t regular.  They support backreferences.  In many of those languages, it would be a backwards incompatible change to change either the name of the engine, or its feature set.  There are more users of these languages who &quot;know&quot; how to use regular expressions than know the actual definition.  Good luck convincing Java, JavaScript and Python to make backwards incompatible changes so we can restore language terminology!<p>Moving on, every description of regular expressions starts with the DFA and NFA terminology.  All of these regular expression engines that I named, when presented with an actual regular expression, solve it like an NFA.  Admittedly with a backtracking algorithm.  Even though their internal states go beyond NFA, it isn&#x27;t actually wrong to say that &quot;This RE engine uses an NFA algorithm on regular expressions.&quot;<p>Given that, it is hopeless either to get people to use &quot;regular expression&quot; in its original meaning, or to get people to stop calling their so-called (but not really) RE engines, NFA implementations.