
Writing programs using ordinary language – MIT News - Immortalin
http://news.mit.edu/2013/writing-programs-using-ordinary-language-0711
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informatimago
Already, above the fold, you see the problem:

    
    
       Text Description:
       three-letter word starting with 'X'.
    
       Regular Expression:
       \bX[A-Za-z]}{2}\b
    
    

"été" is a word too. Without going out of English, "'em" is an English word,
granted, not starting with a X, but demonstrating that letters are not
[A-Za-z].

So once you've specified what you really meant:

    
    
       Sequences of three characters, the first being 'X', 
       and the two others being any letter in the set 
       "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" 
       (and therefore excluding accented letters, ideograms, 
       greek, russian, etc).
    

you realise that you really want to be able to write \bX[A-Za-z]}{2}\b
instead. DUH.

