There's some interesting theoretical work that was done by Srinivas in the 90s[1], that takes a geometric view of pattern matching, based on sheaves, and uses i

There's some interesting theoretical work that was done by Srinivas in the 90s[1], that takes a geometric view of pattern matching, based on sheaves, and uses it to derive a generalized version of KMP that can be applied in other domains. I'm not sure what happened to this research program, and forget most of the details, but I heard a talk by Srinivas and recall thinking it was a very practical and real application of category theory. [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/030439759390239P http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/03043975939...