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Regular expressions and tokens (Score:1)
The problem with doing the latter is that most things people want to parse are too sophisticated for parsing with regular expressions. The Perl5 regex engine is more powerful than standard regular expressions and can match higher-level grammars. I suspect that the regular expressions used would become nasty and slow.
This is the reason people use hybrid parsers on programming languages. The tokens are matched with regular expressions, which are much faster and easier to understand with simple expressions. Assembling the tokens into a parse tree requires a more powerful parser to match the context-free grammar.
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