Are there any good / interesting analogs to regular expressions in 2d?

Question

Are there any good (or at least interesting but flawed) analogs to regular expressions in two dimensions?

In one dimension I can write something like /aaac?(bc)*b?

Answer 1

You're essentially talking about a spatial query language. There are plenty out there if you look up spatial query, geographic query and graphic querying. The spatial part generally comes down to points, lines and objects in a region that have other given attributes. Regions can be specified as polygons, distance from a point (e.g. circles), distance from a linear feature such as a road, all points on one side of a linear feature, etc... You can then get into more complex queries like set of all nearest neighbours, shortest path, travelling salesman, and tesselations like Delaunay TINs and Voronoi diagrams.