Ken Thompson's famous paper on implementing regular expressions is surprisingly simple and yet extremely sophisticated at the same time. The "heart" of the method he proposed was the use of a stack in order to compile the expression to code that parses it, which in this case was IBM 7094 object code.

I find this idea beautiful, and wanted a chance to play around with it for myself, as well as demonstrate to anyone interested the way the algorithm works. Since the aim is demonstration rather than a concrete (or usable) implementation, it makes sense to compile to a high-level language, which is why I have started by targeting Go.

All suggestions are welcome!